In France, in fact, they limit the journalist and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. – Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Puritanism is never so offensive and destructive as when it deals with art matters. – Oscar Wilde Art and Morality: A Defence of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.’
She is like most artists; she is all style without any sincerity. – Oscar Wilde The Nightingale and the Rose
The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral. – Oscar Wilde Art and Morality: A Defence of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.’ Letter to St. James’s Gazette answering criticisms of his novel.
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong. – Oscar Wilde
The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. – Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. – Oscar Wilde The Decay of Lying
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 The Soul of Man Under Socialism
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 The Decay of Lying
The only people a painter should know…are people who are an artistic pleasure to look at and an intellectual repose to talk to. – Oscar Wilde The Model Millionaire
The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
In spite of the roaring of the young lions at the Union, and the screaming of the rabbits in the home of the vivisector, 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
For in some respects Dickens might be likened to those old sculptors of our Gothic cathedrals…whose art lacking sanity was therefore incomplete. Yet they at least knew the limitations of their art, while Dickens never knew the limitations of his. When he tries to be serious, he only succeeds in being dull, when he aims at truth, he merely reaches platitude. – Oscar Wilde A New Book on Dickens
The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman’s heart. – 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. – Oscar Wilde
What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive this old art of Lying. – Oscar Wilde
A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author. – Oscar Wilde
I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist. – Oscar Wilde
There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate – not to the artist, but to the public, blinding them to all but harming the artist not at all. – Oscar Wilde
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital. – Oscar Wilde
No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone. – Oscar Wilde