Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Art embodies the depth of human experience, while artists often approach their craft with playful irreverence.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde suggests that art holds profound significance in society, serving as a mirror to human experiences and emotions. Conversely, he points out that artists possess a unique perspective, approaching their work not with solemnity but with a sense of playfulness, implying that true creativity thrives in an environment free from seriousness and constraint.
Themes
ArtArtistSeriousnessCreativityExpression
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of creativity in education, you could say, 'As Oscar Wilde reminds us, art is the only serious thing in the world.'
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
Nothing is lost and nothing is created in the operations of art as those of nature.
Louis PasteurRead
I like silence. Aesthetically, I feel strangled by the fast cutting and a wall of sound. And I think showing black people thinking onscreen is radical.
Ava DuvernayRead
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Pablo PicassoRead
The artist is a collector of things imaginary or real. He accumulates things with the same enthusiasm that a little boy stuffs his pockets. The scrap heap and the museum are embraced with equal curiosity. He takes snapshots, makes notes and records impressions on tablecloths or newspapers, on backs of envelopes or matchbooks. Why one thing and not another is part of the mystery, but he is omnivorous.
Paul RandRead
The provincial intellectual is doomed to arguing at low level... there is still no Australian literary world, not in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide. It is some consolation to realise that there is no literary world in Birmingham or Los Angeles either. I have heard there is one in Montreal, but I don't believe it. The literary world is in London and New York, the only cities big enough to sustain magazines which can afford to reject copy.
Clive JamesRead
I think you just have to be yourself instead of catering your sound to a specific audience, make the music you want to make, and the audience will find you.
Lewis CapaldiRead