Oscar Wilde Quotes

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

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art. Eliot said that art is the escape from personality, which I think is right. We know that Velázquez embezzled money from the Spanish court and wanted power and so on, but you can't see this in his art.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

In our time, we have become too interested in the artist and his or her character and experience as a way of understanding art. In my view, you should be able to read a book or see a film without knowing a single thing about conditions or circumstances or character of the artist, and experience the work to the full without such information. Sometimes I feel - speaking for myself - that people know much too much about me, and I wish people knew less and could just read these books and respond to them purely as words on a page.

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.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

In literary art, as in the art of the architect, the painter, the musician, signs that the artist is thinking of his own achievement more than of his subject always offend me.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness; and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful.

The artist and his work are not to be separated. The most willfully foolish man cannot stand aloof from his folly, but the deed and the doer together make ever one sober fact.

It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.

In all great arts, as in trees, it is the height that charms us; we care nothing for the roots or trunks, yet it could not be without the aid of these.

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

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.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.