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.
Oscar WildeRead
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead
Similar quotes
Describing Starry Night: Firmament and planets both disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all is bound up remained.
Vincent Van GoghRead
I do not share the pessimism of the age about the novel. They are one of our greatest spiritual, aesthetic and intellectual inventions. As a species it is story that distinguishes us, and one of the supreme expressions of story is the novel. Novels are not content. Nor are they are a mirror to life or an explanation of life or a guide to life. Novels are life, or they are nothing.
Richard FlanaganRead
Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"
David MametRead
I don't take drugs: I am drugs.
Salvador DaliRead
Digital photography is, by definition, unfinished. You don't feel that after every 24 or 36 shots you have to change your film - you know you can go on for ever if you want. You can see the result immediately, and find out if your original idea is worth going on with or not, whether it can be corrected, whether it can be improved.
Abbas KiarostamiRead
It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.
Jennifer EganRead