Oscar Wilde - Art Quotes

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

Oscar Wilde
One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.

Oscar Wilde
Fashion rests upon folly. Art rests upon law. Fashion is ephemeral. Art is eternal. Indeed what is a fashion really? A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!

Oscar Wilde
I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Oscar Wilde
Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.

Oscar Wilde
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

Oscar Wilde
In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.

Oscar Wilde
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Oscar Wilde
Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are always dangerous things—it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.

Oscar Wilde
The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.

Oscar Wilde
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

Oscar Wilde
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.

Oscar Wilde
Now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

Oscar Wilde
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

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

Oscar Wilde
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.

Oscar Wilde
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Oscar Wilde
We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.

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

Oscar Wilde
Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.

Oscar Wilde
Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

Oscar Wilde
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any
conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into
weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the
ideal at all you must not strip it of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it in art.

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

Oscar Wilde
The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference.

Oscar Wilde
All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

Oscar Wilde
In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisect, in spite of Keble College, and the tramways, and the sporting prints, Oxford still remains the most beautiful thing in England, and nowhere else are life and art so exquisitely blended, so perfectly made one.

Oscar Wilde
What of Art? -It is a malady. —Love? -An Illusion. —Religion? -The fashionable substitute for Belief. —You are a sceptic. -Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. —What are you? -To define is to limit.

Oscar Wilde
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.

Oscar Wilde
As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

Oscar Wilde
Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

Oscar Wilde