Oscar Wilde - Art Quotes

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

Oscar Wilde
It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

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
Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

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

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

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
Cynicism is merely the art of seeing things as they are instead of as they ought to be.

Oscar Wilde
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of 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
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools 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
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
The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.

Oscar Wilde
Psycholog­y is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so.

Oscar Wilde
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
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
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
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
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
That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.

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
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
When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

Oscar Wilde
Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence.

Oscar Wilde