"Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world."
"It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is the reason why
music is the perfect type of art."
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. 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.”
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt with out 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 an immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.”
“The 19th century dislike of realism is the rage of caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”
“The 19th century dislike of romanticism is the rage of caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”
“The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.”
“No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.”
“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist in an unpardonable mannerism of style.”
“No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.”
“Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.”
“From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.”
“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.”
“When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.”
“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.”
“All art is quite useless.”
"There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's 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 one's own self.
Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the begger. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion - these are the two things that govern us.
And yet I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream - I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal - to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.
But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals.
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then ut the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also."
Oscar Wilde
