Oct 16, 1854 - Nov 30, 1900
was an Irish writer and poet
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To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.
In love, it is better to know and be disappointed, than to not know and always wonder.
Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
When liberty comes with hands dabbled in blood it is hard to shake hands with her.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating; people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
I am not young enough to know everything.
It is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is a proper judge of it
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.
Journalism is the first rough draft of history.
Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.
I have met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Insincerity is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities
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.
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
Society exists only as a mental concept; in the real world there are only individuals.
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.
You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
Men become old, but they never become good
The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it
Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a nice plump missionary
Hatred is blind, as well as love.