Wilde Ideas

I am not laughing; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. This is only the beginning.

I think your nature so deep.

The people who love only once in their life 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. Faithfulness! The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

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My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

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Soul and body, body and soul - how mysterious they were! There was an animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshy impulse ceased, or the physical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitary definitions of definitions of the ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of various schools! Was the soul seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also.

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- The Picture of Dorian Gray