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Oscar Wilde Quotes

Browse 205 quotes about Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde Quotes

“I am not perfect, but if I looked perfect to everyone I must have been rocking imperfect perfectly to a few imperfect souls that seek imperfection vs. perfection, in an imperfect world where God asks us to seek perfection for our imperfect souls.”

HumorPerfectLaughingJokesPerfectionCriticsStupidityJudgementImperfectionImperfectInsecurePietyStupid PeopleHatersOscar WildeEthnic CleansingSelf RighteousnessBrainwashedGibberishConundrumChristian HypocrisyJudgersJudegmentGroup CyberbullingPhilosophical Redundance
Author:Shannon L. Alder
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“Dear Boy, Why don’t you write to me? I don’t know what has become of you. As for me I am ruined. The law suit is going against me and I am afraid I will have to pay costs, which means leaving Oxford and doing some horrid work to earn bread. The world is too much for me. However, I have seen Greece and had some golden days of youth. I go back to Oxford immediately for viva voce and then think of rowing up the river to town with Frank Miles. Will you come? Yours Oscar”

PeopleWorldLifeLettersOscar Wilde
Author:Oscar Wilde
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“So he was queer, E.M. Forster. It wasn't his middle name (that would be 'Morgan'), but it was his orientation, his romping pleasure, his half-secret, his romantic passion. In the long-suppressed novel Maurice the title character blurts out his truth, 'I'm an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.' It must have felt that way when Forster came of sexual age in the last years of the 19th century: seriously risky and dangerously blurt-able. The public cry had caught Wilde, exposed and arrested him, broken him in prison. He was one face of anxiety to Forster; his mother was another. As long as she lived (and they lived together until she died, when he was 66), he couldn't let her know.”

RomanceSecretsComing OutMothersHomosexuality19th CenturyGay MenOscar WildeSexual OrientationClosetedEm ForsterMaurice Novel
Author:Michael Levenson
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“Reading the very best writers—let us say Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy—is not going to make us better citizens. Art is perfectly useless, according to the sublime Oscar Wilde, who was right about everything. He also told us that all bad poetry is sincere. Had I the power to do so, I would command that these words be engraved above every gate at every university, so that each student might ponder the splendor of the insight.”

PoetryReadingOscar WildeCanon
Book:The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
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“Innocence and idiocy aren’t the same thing. Sometimes it’s brave. Sometimes it’s just how a person is.” “So, ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’?” I raised an eyebrow; he elaborated. “Oscar Wilde.” I liked that. “It’s not wrong to look at the stars.” But it also wasn’t some failing of will or fall from grace that kept my eyes fixed to the ground. I’d just been down here in the gutter long enough to know to watch my step.”

FamilyMafiaOscar WildeOlive OilAnd We All Bled Oil
Book:And We All Bled Oil
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“I tought 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.”

NovelOscar WildeClassicsDorian Gray
Book:The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories
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