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"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."
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"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."
"One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin."
"A picture is a voiceless poem, a poem is a vocal picture."
"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."
"The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness."
Explore more quotes by Oscar Wilde
"Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life."
"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him."
"And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation."
"Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out."
"Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself.She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance."
"To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography."
"Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves."
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