Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art and society should uphold the same standards of beauty and structure, emphasizing the importance of form.
Oscar Wilde suggests that the principles guiding good society should mirror those that govern art, underscoring the significance of form in both realms. This viewpoint posits that just as art requires a strong form to convey meaning and beauty, society too must adhere to these standards to cultivate an environment of aesthetic and moral value.
Themes
ArtSocietyFormBeautyStandards
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech on creativity and society, one might quote Wilde to highlight the interrelation of aesthetics and social values.
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
For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.
Louise BrooksRead
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
Charles BaudelaireRead
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean CocteauRead
Living here on Earth, we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos, poetry is born.
Daisaku IkedaRead
I'm not a politician. I don't know how to solve the problems of the world. But as an artist, I have one duty: to ask questions.
Marjane SatrapiRead
I think of making love and making art as being very parallel. Even the most amateur attempt can be thrilling.
Julia CameronRead