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Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in..
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life
love
inspirational
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Oscar Wilde |
bc305dc
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The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.
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women
beauty
humor
plainness
making-love
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Oscar Wilde |
2aef816
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People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
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shallowness
visible
superficial
invisible
thought
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Oscar Wilde |
60188d1
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I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
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family
humor
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Oscar Wilde |
de7bee1
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Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women. It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.
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escape
women
humor
eve
paradise
sarcasm
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Oscar Wilde |
7e83330
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The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
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Oscar Wilde |
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I didn't say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.
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Oscar Wilde |
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She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost.
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Oscar Wilde |
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I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.
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beauty
the-picture-of-dorian-gray
oscar-wilde
colours
painting
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Oscar Wilde |
27d3c1c
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I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about it's use. It is hitting below the intellect.
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Oscar Wilde |
032c911
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Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable
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wit
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Oscar Wilde |
21802be
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I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
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Oscar Wilde |
3a74057
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It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.
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worship
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Oscar Wilde |
a24284a
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I don't write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.
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Oscar Wilde |
2f4ba16
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Do you smoke? Well, yes, I must admit I smoke. I'm glad to hear of it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.
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Oscar Wilde |
2a97330
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When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
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Oscar Wilde |
9b8aee4
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It is not wise to find symbols in everything that one sees. It makes life too full of terrors.
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Oscar Wilde |
3e92c6c
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What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.
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soul
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Oscar Wilde |
5705d64
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Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
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Oscar Wilde |
69b9ef6
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In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
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Oscar Wilde |
b4ae033
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Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions." "I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it..
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Oscar Wilde |
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He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.
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humour
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Oscar Wilde |
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Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs.
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Oscar Wilde |
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I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
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Oscar Wilde |
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It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
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Oscar Wilde |
0d0c7eb
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every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
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portrait
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Oscar Wilde |
41a967c
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My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failures.
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imagination
shallow
intellect
loyalty
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Oscar Wilde |
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As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
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oscar-wilde
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Oscar Wilde |
2e79bfd
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And alien tears will fill for him pity's long broken urn. For his mourners will all be outcast men, and outcasts always mourn.
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Oscar Wilde |
e716df2
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You told me you had destroyed it." "I was wrong. It has destroyed me."
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the-picture-of-dorian-gray
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Oscar Wilde |
bfc5c11
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Art only begins where Imitation ends.
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Oscar Wilde |
ef6159e
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I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result.
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humor
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Oscar Wilde |
2fcebed
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Love is easily killed.
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Oscar Wilde |
d2ef30f
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Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.
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suffering
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Oscar Wilde |
a7d56dc
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The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.
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Oscar Wilde |
7a76760
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I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day--mock me horribly!
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jealousy
vanity
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Oscar Wilde |
99dc1ee
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Dear little Swallow,' said the Prince, 'you tell me of marvelous things, but more marvelous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.
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Oscar Wilde |
0881f8a
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Genius lasts longer than beauty
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Oscar Wilde |
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The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.
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Oscar Wilde |
a2f69a2
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Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.
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undervalued
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Oscar Wilde |
1f9f5d0
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She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.
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Oscar Wilde |
1a5063f
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You and I will always be friends." "Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that." --
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Oscar Wilde |
c923cde
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But she is happiest alone. She is happiest alone.
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Oscar Wilde |
06121f6
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When good Americans die, they go to Paris" "Where do bad Americans go?" "They stay in America"
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Oscar Wilde |