The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new...

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR...

was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward,

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

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, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

I have grown to love secrecy.

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose."

The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul."

conscience that made me do so: it was a sort of cowardice.

"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."

"I don't believe that, Harry, and I don't believ...

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

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."

my friends for

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

detesting

the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

that if any one of us makes an ass of himself, he is poaching on their preserves.

Indeed, the probabilities are that 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.

They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."

"I hate them for it,"

We have lost the

abstract sense of beauty.

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day."

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side

of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies."

One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.

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.

To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.

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

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion--these are the two

things that go...

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

when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it,

And beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing....

Why should it keep what I must lose?