Intentions Quotes

“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. ”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough – more than enough, I should imagine.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives everything except genius. ”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“We look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. ”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“Are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“Art and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to poetry, but he saw how important costume is as a means of producing certain dramatic effects.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“We try to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this Art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions Annotated

“Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions Annotated

“Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance.
Tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present.
Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader — the cultured and fascinating liar.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“Life! Life! Don’t let us go to life for our fulfilment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only that that can satisfy the artistic and critical temperament”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions

“Shakespear appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to poetry.”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions: The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil and Poison, The Critic as Artist, The Truth of Masks

“Sophist”
― Oscar Wilde, Intentions