Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wildewas an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 October 1854
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
I would have a workshop attached to every school, and one hour a day given up to the teaching of simple decorative arts. It would be a golden hour to the children.
Work is a refuge of people who have nothing better to do.
In its primary aspect, a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives.
The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.
A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.
A mans face is his autobiography. A women's face is her work of fiction.
No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
Who am I to tamper with a masterpiece?
When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.