O.Wilde, Preface to 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. (...)
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. (...)

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. (...)
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself...


O. Wilde (1854-1900),
Preface to 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'


Thursday, January 25, 2018

Virginia Woolf

born on 25th January 1882 

"Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning,musical; then the hour, irrevocable"
(Mrs. Dalloway, 1925)


 

Virginia Woolf

born on January 25,  136 years ago

 

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out of her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning - fresh as if issued to children on a beach."  (Mrs. Dalloway, 1925)