Quotes from Oscar Wilde

When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

Beauty ...is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.

Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.

In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.... The Japanese people are ... simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art.

Art persists, it timelessly continues.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

There are moments when art attains almost to the dignity of manual labor.

Temperament is the primary requisite for the critic - a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Psycholog­y is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so.

The best one can say of modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality.

If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.