Oscar Wilde Quotes on Art (57 Quotes)






    You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid


    Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are - my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks - we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.

    A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection.


    His work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist.

    For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.

    Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory.

    The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

    It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

    The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

    The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists of the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

    In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. . . . The Japanese people are. . . simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.

    One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

    No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

    No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

    A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

    The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

    Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.

    The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

    There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate --- not to the artist but to the public. . . .

    Genius learns from nature, its own nature. Talent learns from art.

    All art is quite useless. So is a flower.

    While one should always study the method of a great artist, one should never imitate his manner. The manner of an artist is essentially individual, the method of an artist is absolutely universal.

    Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

    Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

    The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.


    No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

    Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

    Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

    It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

    The poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts.

    The final revelation is that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.

    Art never expresses anything but itself.

    Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music -- his own.

    In his very rejection of art Walt Whitman is an artist. He tried to produce a certain effect by certain means and he succeeded. . . . He stands apart, and the chief value of his work is in its prophecy, not in its performance.

    In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

    Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.

    The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

    Art is the most intense mode of invidualism that the world has known.

    Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital I.

    I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.... The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art I altered the minds of men and the colour of things there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.... I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

    Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

    Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

    All costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is not the Fancy Ball.

    It is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes.


    More Oscar Wilde Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Life - Art - World - Woman - People - Pleasure - Youth - Beauty - Love - Passion - Age - Money & Wealth - Soul - Society & Civilization - Facts - Work & Career - Sin - Mind - View All Oscar Wilde Quotations

    More Oscar Wilde Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - The Importance of Being Earnest
    - The Picture of Dorian Gray

    Related Authors


    William Shakespeare - George Bernard Shaw - Richard Steele - John Fletcher - Jean Racine - Henry Porter - Hannah Cowley - George Colman - Anton Chekhov - Alexandre Dumas


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