The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Original 1890 Edition (A Oscar Wilde Classics)

by Oscar Wilde

When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?”

“I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world’s history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.

“Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?” asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. “American novels,” answered Lord Henry,

“But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?” asked Mr. Erskine plaintively. “I don’t feel up to the journey.”

“I can sympathize with everything except suffering,” said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. “I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores, the better.”

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.

It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting.

You don’t know what an existence they lead down there. It is pure unadulterated country life. They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. Youth!

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.