Quotes About Expression

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. In art, as in politics, there is but one origin for all revolutions, a desire on the part of man for a nobler form of life, for a freer method and opportunity of expression

On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Life is short, art is infinite.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

I wish i could write them down, these little coloured parables or poems that live for a moment in some cell of my brain, and then leave it to go wandering elsewhere. I hate writing; the mere act of writing a thing down is troublesome to me. I want some fine medium, and look for it in vain.

Looking around his hotel room not long before expiring: This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has to go.

Nothing really at any period of my life was ever of the smallest importance to me compared with Art. But in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.

He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield.

I put all my talent into my works; I put my genius into my life

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

Mere words.. Was there anything so real as words?

It was only in the theatre that I lived.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

I'm really very sorry, but it is not my fault. People are so annoying. All my pianists look exactly like poets, and all my poets look exactly like pianists

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE

Then why won't you exhibit his portrait?' asked Lord Henry. 'Because without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have never cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never know anything about it. But the world might guess it; and I will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing Harry - too much of myself!