Good Oscar Wilde Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Good Oscar Wilde. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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A good friend will always stab you in the front.
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Oscar Wilde
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It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)
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No good deed goes unpunished.
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Oscar Wilde
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After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations.
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Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)
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I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
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Oscar Wilde
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The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.
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Oscar Wilde
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I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
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Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)
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The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
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Oscar Wilde
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Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
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Oscar Wilde
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When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completelyβ€”or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!
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Oscar Wilde
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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 (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.
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Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)
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There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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It is better to be beautiful then to be good, but it is better to be good then to be ugly.
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Oscar Wilde
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Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden." "But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!" "I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing." "That may be, but the muffins are the same!
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.
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Oscar Wilde
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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 (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
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Oscar Wilde
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If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
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Oscar Wilde
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The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
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Oscar Wilde
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Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.
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Stephen Fry
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I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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The world seemed to me fine because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived.
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Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)
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I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left. ALGERNON: We have. JACK: I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about? ALGERNON: The fools? Oh! about the clever people of course. JACK: What fools.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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Good taste is the excuse I've always given for leading such a bad life
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Oscar Wilde
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Because sometimes you have to do something bad to do something good.
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Oscar Wilde (The Complete Fairy Tales)
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Good heavens! how marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)
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It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.
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Oscar Wilde (The Portrait of Mr. W.H.)
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Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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It’s absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
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Oscar Wilde
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There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me
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Oscar Wilde (De Profundis)
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I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think that it is rather vain.
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Oscar Wilde
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Everyone may not be good, but there's always something good in everyone. Never judge anyone shortly because every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
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Oscar Wilde
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To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.
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Oscar Wilde
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The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)
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The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously.Β  If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t.Β  Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere’s Fan)
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MRS ALLONBY Have you tried a good reputation? LORD ILLINGWORTH It is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected.
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Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)
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Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. 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 (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and thenβ€”who knows?β€”rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)
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What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings)
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Men become old, but they never become good.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)
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it would be a very good thing if people were taught how to speak. Language is the noblest instrument we have, either for the revealing or the concealing of thought; talk itself is a sort of spiritualized action; and conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.
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Oscar Wilde (Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast)
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For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings)
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Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.
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Oscar Wilde (Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast)
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There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand.Β  To shut one’s eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere’s Fan)
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Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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I must remember that a good friend is a new world.
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Oscar Wilde (The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde)
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I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutionsβ€”that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice." Lord Henry smiled. "People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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There is no good talking to him," said a Dragon-fly, who was sitting on the top of a large brown bulrush; "no good at all, for he has gone away." "Well, that is his loss, not mine," answered the Rocket. "I am not going to stop talking to him merely because he pays no attention. I like hearing myself talk. It is one of my greatest pleasures. I often have long conversations all by myself, and I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying." "Then you should definitely lecture on Philosophy," said the Dragon-fly.
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Oscar Wilde (The Happy Prince)
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She has form," he said to himself, as he walked away through the grove - "that cannot be denied to her; but has she got feeling? I am afraid not. In fact, she is like most artists; she is all style, without any sincerity. She would not sacrifice herself for others. She thinks merely of music, and everybody knows that arts are selfish. Still, it must be admitted that she has some beautiful notes in her voice. What a pity it is that they do not mean anything, or do any practical good.
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Oscar Wilde (The Nightingale and the Rose)
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Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays)
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To make a good salad is to be a brilliant diplomat - the problem is entirely the same in both cases. To know how much oil to mix in with one's vinegar.
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Oscar Wilde
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I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.
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Oscar Wilde (Vera Or The Nihilists)
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It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)
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Good writers borrow, great writers steal. β€”T. S. Eliot (but possibly stolen from Oscar Wilde)
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Jean Hanff Korelitz (The Plot (The Book Series, #1))
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To be good is to be in harmony with ones self. Discord is to be forces to be in harmony with others.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Women have no appreciation of good looksβ€”at least, good women have not.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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There is no such thing as good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from a scientific point of view.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
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Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)
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My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don't see why I shouldn't give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of ant use to oneself.
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Oscar Wilde (An Ideal Husband)
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All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised. When it is violently, grossly, and cruelly used, it produces a good effect by creating, or at any rate bringing out, the spirit of revolt and individualism that is to kill it. When it is used with a certain amount of kindness, and accompanied by prizes and rewards, it is dreadfully demoralising. People, in that case, are less conscious of the horrible pressure that is being put on them, and so go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment.
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Oscar Wilde (The Soul of Man Under Socialism)
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All bad art is the result of good intentions.
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Oscar Wilde
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Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.
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Oscar Wilde
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He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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They did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.
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Oscar Wilde (A House of Pomegranates)
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The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfect uninteresting in what they are.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.
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Oscar Wilde (The Soul of Man Under Socialism)
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Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do." "But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and old, and wrinkled? What then?" "Ah, then," said Lord Henry, rising to go, "then, my dear Dorian, you would have to fight for your victories. As it is, they are brought to you. No, you must keep your good looks. We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. We cannot spare you." (8.19)
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
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Oscar Wilde
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I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
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Oscar Wilde
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I don't think now that people can be divided into the good and the bad, as though they were two separate races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin. Bad women. as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentence, pity, sacrifice.
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Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)
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The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest contempt for optimism.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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My dear boy," said Lord Henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not, by any means, an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which men can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.
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Oscar Wilde
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The gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes bring you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
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Oscar Wilde
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There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.' 'Why?' 'Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here ofr. 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. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us. And yet [...] I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. [...] We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. ... The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
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Oscar Wilde
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Basil my dear boy puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices his principles and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet a really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.
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Oscar Wilde
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I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn't pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against 'the politics of confrontation.' I suppose that, if this collection has a point, it is the desire of one individual to see the idea of confrontation kept alive.
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Christopher Hitchens (Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports)
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No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with itshideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don't frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius-- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile. . . . People say sometimes that beauty is only 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. . . . Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you.But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully.When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.... Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days,listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals,of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism-- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.With your personality there is nothing you could not do.The world belongs to you for a season. . . . The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself.I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last--such a little time.The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again.The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Why is it that at a bachelor's establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information. I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. Good Heavens! Is marriage so demoralizing as that? I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.
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Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest)
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There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoralβ€”immoral from the scientific point of view." "Why?" "Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectlyβ€”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 hat 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. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religionβ€”these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dreamβ€”I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic idealβ€”to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (Collector's Edition): Including the Uncensored 13 Chapter Version & The Revised 20 Chapter Version)
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The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.
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Oscar Wilde (The Soul of Man Under Socialism, the Socialist Ideal Art, and the Coming Solidarity. by Oscar Wilde, William Morris, W.C. Owen)
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Our textbooks were ridiculous propaganda. The first English sentence we learned was "Long live Chairman Mao!" But no one dared to explain the sentence grammatically. In Chinese the term for the optative mood, expressing a wish or desire, means 'something unreal." In 1966 a lecturer at Sichuan University had been beaten up for 'having the audacity to suggest that "Long live Chairman Mao!" was unreal!" One chapter was about a model youth hero who had drowned after jumping into a flood to save an electricity pole because the pole would be used to carry the word of Mao. With great difficulty, I managed to borrow some English language textbooks published before the Cultural Revolution from lecturers in my department and from Jin-ming, who sent me books from his university by post. These contained extracts from writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde, and stories from European and American history. They were a joy to read, but much of my energy went toward finding them and then trying to keep them. Whenever someone approached, I would quickly cover the books with a newspaper. This was only partly because of their 'bourgeois' content. It was also important not to appear to be studying too conscientiously, and not to arouse my fellow students' jealousy by reading something far beyond them. Although we were studying English, and were paid par fly for our propaganda value by the government to do this, we must not be seen to be too devoted to our subject: that was considered being 'white and expert." In the mad logic of the day, being good at one's profession ('expert') was automatically equated with being politically unreliable ('white').
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Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
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He is all my art to me now," said the painter gravely. "I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, sketch from him. Of course, I have done all that. But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won't tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. There is nothing that art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious wayβ€”I wonder will you understand me?β€”his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before. 'A dream of form in days of thought'β€”who is it who says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of this ladβ€”for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twentyβ€” his merely visible presenceβ€”ah! I wonder can you realize all that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and bodyβ€” how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for and always missed.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)