Intentions

by Oscar Wilde

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

As one knows the poet by his fine music, so one can recognise the liar by his rich rhythmic utterance, and in neither case will the casual inspiration of the moment suffice.

In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and imaginative power.

Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like.

The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear.

By deliberate choice he has made himself a romanticist.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.

the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.

Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.

But wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.’

Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of Fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of Romance.

For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilised society,

‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread.

Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.

Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right.

The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence.

You have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better.

Art never expresses anything but itself.

The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

The only portraits in which one believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter, and a very great deal of the artist.

It is style that makes us believe in a thing—nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in Art.

Just as those who do not love Plato more than Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.

Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.

The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.

Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

A mask tells us more than a face.