Oscar Wilde
1401 citations

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. ✨ Oscar Wilde (1999). De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings, p.159, Wordsworth Editions

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DeathHopeHumanity

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