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.
Oscar WildeRead
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
Oscar WildeRead
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