"Literature must rest always on a principle,..." - Quote by Oscar Wilde
Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
More by Oscar Wilde
“I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.”
“Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.”
“It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.”
More on Literature
“Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”
“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.”
“I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.”
More on Art
“The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.”
“I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”
“It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.”