37 Oscar Wilde Quotes on Culture

Oscar Wilde quotes on culture

14. And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

15. We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

18. All art is immoral.

27. Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

31. Art persists, it timelessly continues.

35. Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.

36. Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

45. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

47. The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

51. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

52. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

57. Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

60. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

65. Genius lasts longer than beauty.

72. Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

100. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.

104. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

116. What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

122. It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

123. In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

133. The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

135. Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris. Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to? Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.

136. The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.

140. Now-a-days it is only the unreadable that occurs.

155. Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

156. It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.

161. No gentleman ever has any money.

198. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

200. Closed eyes listen, afraid to see on their own. Easily influenced and simply conformed.

201. Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

202. Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

224. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

228. America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between (also attributed to George Bernard Shaw and Georges Clemenceau).

230. Buck up and be jolly, my dear lady! Stillbirth is a sign that God has a sense of humour!

242. Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

246. What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platter the plums for the puddings he peddles in the provinces.

250. The dinner table was Wilde's event and made him the greatest talker of his time: