Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Wilde suggests that artists should not be confined by moral obligations in their work.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde argues that true artistry should be free from the constraints of ethical considerations. He perceives ethical sympathy as a limitation that distorts an artist's style, suggesting that creativity thrives in the absence of such moral encumbrances. The implication is that artists should prioritize their unique expressions over societal expectations or moral judgments.
Themes
ArtCreativityEthicsFreedomExpression
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in an art critique to emphasize the importance of creative freedom.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes βLondon is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
Oscar WildeRead
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Oscar WildeRead
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Oscar WildeRead
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead
Similar quotes
Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.
Charles DickensRead
Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.
Brian EnoRead
If you like my poems let them _x000D_ walk in the evening, a little behind you
E. E. CummingsRead
Modern storytellers are the descendants of an immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bards, griots, cantadoras, cantors, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people.
Clarissa Pinkola EstesRead
The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day's last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.
F. Scott FitzgeraldRead
I think good radio often uses the techniques of fiction: characters, scenes, a big urgent emotional question. And as in the best fiction, tone counts for a lot.
Ira GlassRead