Those who find ugly
meanings
in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming.
being charming.
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
And yet how
difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Is the
soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the
soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter is
a mystery, and the unison of spirit with matter is a mystery also.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written or badly written-that is all.
Marriage is a sort of forcing house. It brings strange sins to fruit,
and sometimes strange renunciations.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,
but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect
medium.
A sense of duty is like some horrible disease. It destroys the tissues
of the mind, as certain complaints destroy the tissues of the body. The
catechism has a great deal to answer for.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.
Few people have sufficient strength to resist the preposterous claims of
orthodoxy.
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes.
That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
A virtue is like a city set upon a hill--it cannot be hid. We can
conceal our vices if we care to--for a time at least--but a virtue will
out.
Can't make out how you stand London society. The thing has gone to the
dogs: a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.
You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure,
unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much
to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.
Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless
it be telling the truth.
Who cares whether Mr Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of
word and epithet, is, at least, as great a work of art as any of those
wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's gallery--greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not
merely because its equal beauty is more enduring but on account of the
fuller variety of its appeal--soul speaking to soul in those long,
cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional
utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative
insight and with poetic aim--greater, I always think, even as literature
is the greater art.
difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools! Is the
soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the
soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter is
a mystery, and the unison of spirit with matter is a mystery also.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written or badly written-that is all.
Marriage is a sort of forcing house. It brings strange sins to fruit,
and sometimes strange renunciations.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,
but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect
medium.
A sense of duty is like some horrible disease. It destroys the tissues
of the mind, as certain complaints destroy the tissues of the body. The
catechism has a great deal to answer for.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.
Few people have sufficient strength to resist the preposterous claims of
orthodoxy.
She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes.
That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
A virtue is like a city set upon a hill--it cannot be hid. We can
conceal our vices if we care to--for a time at least--but a virtue will
out.
Can't make out how you stand London society. The thing has gone to the
dogs: a lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.
You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure,
unadulterated country life. They get up early because they have so much
to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.
Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless
it be telling the truth.
Who cares whether Mr Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate
symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of
word and epithet, is, at least, as great a work of art as any of those
wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in
England's gallery--greater, indeed, one is apt to think at times, not
merely because its equal beauty is more enduring but on account of the
fuller variety of its appeal--soul speaking to soul in those long,
cadenced lines, not through form and colour alone, though through these,
indeed, completely and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional
utterance, with lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative
insight and with poetic aim--greater, I always think, even as literature
is the greater art.
