Quotes by Oscar Wilde

The aim of life is self-development. To realize ones nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to ones self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.

And how delightful other peoples emotions were!-much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. Ones own soul, and the passions of ones friends-those were the fascinating things in life.

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

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

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

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.I hate them for it, cried Hallward. 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. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.

When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

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.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

God and other artists are always a little obscure.....

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

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