Oscar Wilde Art Quotations [Page 2]

A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

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.

The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.

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.

No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.

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

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.

Music is the perfect type of art.

It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

In one dancing saloon I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice: 'Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.'

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.

That is the mission of art - to make us pause and look at a thing a second time.

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

Nature constantly imitates art.

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.

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.

Music is the art... which most completely realizes the artistic idea and is the condition to which all the other arts are constantly aspiring.

The gods bestowed on Max [Beerbohm] the gift of perpetual old age.

M. Zola is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.

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.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.

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. He has begun a prelude to larger themes. He is the herald to a new era. As a man he is the precursor of a fresh type. He is a factor in the heroic and spiritual evolution of the human being. If Poetry has passed him by, Philosophy will take note of him.

There is only good art and mediocre art.

Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.

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

The proper school to learn art is not life but art

I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art.

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! It is quite clear that were it beautiful and rational we would not alter anything that combined those two rare qualities. And wherever dress has been so, it has remained unchanged in law and principle for many hundred years.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art.

The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.

Art should never be popular.

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

California is an Italy without its art.

What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

Art persists, it timelessly continues.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

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.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

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

When bankers get together they talk about art. When artists get together, they talk about money.

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

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