'The Decay of Lying', part 3 +

[fiefoe]

www.victorianweb.org/authors/wilde/decay.html

• The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us.
• Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.
• Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly.
• Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle.
• Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
• Those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.
• The basis of life -- the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it -- is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting  various forms through which this expression can be attained.
• Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.
  

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A different take:
   Some have hypothesised that the colours and haziness in Turner’s work are simply a consequence of volcanic dust in the stratosphere following the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815.  Neuroscientists, however, recognise that here was a fellow investigator carrying out pioneering work in experimental psychology.

via, via.

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