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.
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.
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His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead
Similar quotes
Theater is my temple and my religion and my act of faith. Strangers sit in a room together and believe together.
Harvey FiersteinRead
The first thing that an architect must do is to sense that every building you build is a world of its own, and that this world of its own serves an institution.
Louis KahnRead
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
Luigi PirandelloRead
How happily, said Austerlitz, have I sat over a book in the deepening twilight until I could no longer make out the words and my mind began to wander, and how secure have I felt seated at the desk in my house in the dark night, just watching the tip of my pencil in the lamplight following its shadow, as if of its own accord and with perfect fidelity, while that shadow moved regularly from left to right, line by line, over the ruled paper.
W. G. SebaldRead
Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.
Alan RickmanRead
I paint things as they are. I don't comment. I record.
Henri De Toulouse-LautrecRead