“The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.”

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About Oscar Wilde

Irish author, poet and playwright

Oscar Wilde was an Irish author, poet and playwright of the late 19th century. He became one of London’s most popular and influential dramatists in the early 1890s, and is closely associated with the Aestheticism movement. He is best known for The Picture of Dorian Gray, his epigrams, plays and children’s stories. His writing often combines wit, style and pointed observation, and his reputation is also shaped by his 1895 criminal conviction for gross indecency and for practising homosexual acts.

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Books by Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray

His only novel, full of quotable lines.

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