Oscar Wilde

When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money

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.

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

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

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

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

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

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

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

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

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.

And how delightful other people's emotions were!-much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's friends-those were the fascinating things in life.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly__hat 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 self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.

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 some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize 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 self.

You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

And after the second year was over, the Soul said to the young Fisherman at night-time, and as he sat in the wattled house alone, "Lo! now I have tempted thee with evil, and I have tempted thee with good, and thy love is stronger than I am. Wherefore will I tempt thee no longer, but I pray thee to suffer me to enter thy heart, that I may be with thee even as before.""Surely thou mayest enter," said the young Fisherman, "for in the days when with no heart thou didst go through the world thou must have suffered.""Alas!" cried his Soul, "I can find no place of entrance, so compassed about with love is this heart of thine.