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

by Oscar Wilde

life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape;

a new Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.

Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be.

it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it.

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system,

no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.

He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be.”

One often imagines things that are quite absurd.

I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.”

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed.

People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.

In this country, it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”

One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends.

You have filled them with a madness for pleasure.

“I shall show you my soul. You shall see the thing that you fancy only God can see.”

The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy.

He felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation.

But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.

“That awful thing, a woman’s memory!”

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.

Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.

“The dead linger sometimes.

The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne.

Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.

for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.

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.

under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas.

“It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.”

“It is perfectly monstrous,” he said, at last, “the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.”

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”

“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

If we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors.

Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.”

“I wish it were fin du globe,” said Dorian with a sigh. “Life is a great disappointment.”

“don’t tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows that life has exhausted him.

“What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!”

“A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.”

“I like men who have a future and women who have a past,”

“Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.”

She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.

White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences.”

He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type.”

“Ah! what a nuisance people’s people are!