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

by Oscar Wilde

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.

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.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead...

But then in the Church they don’t think.

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us.

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,”

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

I like to find out people for myself.

“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one,”

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

‘A dream of form in days of thought’—who

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”

All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity.

“You are too charming to go in for philanthropy,

It is so tedious a subject that one would have to talk seriously about it.

“There is no such thing as a good influence,

All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.”

“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

The aim of life is self-development.

They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.

Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these ar...

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

Don’t speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think.”

But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us.

give a plastic form to formless things,

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?

Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing....

We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid,

“Always! That is a dreadful word.

They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice...

“In that case, let our friendship be a caprice,” he murmured, flushing at his own boldness,

Mr. Gray, come over and look at yourself.” The lad started, as if awakened from some dream.

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young.