Skip to content

“Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.”

Permalink: Oscar Wilde

About this quote

Lord Henry is talking to Dorian about what beauty actually is, and Wilde separates the artist's gift from the ability to explain what the gift has produced. The sentence is the most quotable moment in the novel's long argument about aesthetics, and it is still used when someone praises work that cannot be defended in its own terms.

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 2

Topics

Related quotes

Quotes that share a topic with this one.