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Oscar Wilde -
Art
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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
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The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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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
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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
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Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.
Oscar Wilde
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All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as they ought to be.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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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
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The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.
Oscar Wilde
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Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde
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If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.
Oscar Wilde
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The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
Oscar Wilde
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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
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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
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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
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I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Oscar Wilde
Creative Commons
Born:
October 16, 1854
Died:
November 30, 1900
(aged 46)
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