Oscar Wilde Quotes


The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.


Citations

Wilde, Oscar. "The Decay of Lying." Intentions. James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., 1891, p. 38.

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Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
  • Born: October 16, 1854
  • Died: November 30, 1900
  • Nationality: Irish
  • Profession: Author, Poet, Playwright

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.