"If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly ...

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












Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
More Oscar Wilde quotes
"Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistic...
"Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
"Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
"A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
"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.... A fresh mo...
"Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
"A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
"The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
"When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money
"What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
"A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
"Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself
"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...
"To become a work of art is the object of living.