Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type, are artistically uninteresting.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Romantic art focuses on unique individuals rather than commonplace people.
Oscar Wilde suggests that romantic art is concerned with exceptional individuals and their unique experiences, implying that those who are merely normal or typical do not provide the depth or intrigue necessary for artistic exploration. This perspective values individuality and the extraordinary, positioning good, ordinary people as less interesting in the context of artistic expression.
Themes
Romantic ArtIndividualityExceptionNormalCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
During a lecture on art history, one might use this quote to discuss the importance of individuality in artistic expression.
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.
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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.
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Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
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Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.
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An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn't been seen before?
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Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears.
Dan SimmonsRead
So when I realised I could sing for a living - do what I loved and be paid for it - I thought, 'This is unbelievable. Unbelievable!' And that feeling has never left me.
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