The Decay Of Lying Quotes

“Paradox though it may seem - and paradoxes are always dangerous things - it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates mind. Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire. Who cares for the Second Empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art's subjectmatter we should be more or less indifferent. We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind. It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an admirable motive for a tragedy.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“My dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“If something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Practice precedes perfection.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Art begins with abstract decoration with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non existent.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff. In Falstaff there is something of Hamlet, in Hamlet there is not a little of Falstaff. The fat knight has his moods of melancholy, and the young prince his moments of coarse humour. Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: in dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearance, tricks of habit and the like. The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

“Life imitates Art far more than art imitates life.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“CYRIL: Well, you need not look at the landscape. You can lie on the grass and smoke and talk.
VIVIAN: But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One's individuality absolutely leaves one. And then Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age in undoubtedly the decay of lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure. The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Art begins with abstract decoration, with
purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is
unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life
becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be
admitted into the charmed circle.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I. Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word “Whim”.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

“CYRIL. Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.

VIVIAN. I assure you that they do not. They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb responsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once. No, the politicians won't do. Something may, perhaps, be urged on behalf of the Bar. The mantle of the Sophist has fallen on its members.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of overemphasis.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying

“the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if possible, be discouraged.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Decay Of Lying