Oct 16, 1854 - Nov 30, 1900
was an Irish writer and poet
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True friends stab you in the front.
I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing.
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
Biography lends to death a new terror.
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better.
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.
The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
Work is a refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.
His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.
Work is the curse of the drinking class.
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back in again.
Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
