Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is influenced by art more than art is influenced by life.
This quote suggests that the experiences, emotions, and realities of life are often shaped by the arts, such as literature, painting, and performance, rather than mere reflections of real-life occurrences. Oscar Wilde emphasizes the powerful impact that artistic expression has on how we perceive and engage with the world around us, indicating a deeper connection between the two realms.
Themes
LifeArtImitationInfluenceExpression
In practice
Example use cases
During an art exhibit opening, one might quote this to emphasize the profound impact of the displayed works on personal experiences.
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
When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.
Mario BenedettiRead
I think the way to be a writer is to experience things, certainly, and be open to things, but at some point to become dedicated to the craft of writing and to create a stable environment for that writing to occur in.
T. C. BoyleRead
All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
Charles BaudelaireRead
Truly great actors carry their characters in silence with them. They communicate without words the relationships that predate the movie.
Sam MendesRead
Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.
Patti SmithRead
The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.
Anne SextonRead