The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

"From a label there is no escape! I refuse the title."

"You disarm me, Gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood. "Of your shield, Harry, not of your spear."

"You are a sceptic." "Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith." "What are you?" "To define is to limit." "Give me a clue."

Well, she made it out of nothing. All good hats are made out of nothing." "Like all good reputations, Gladys," interrupted Lord Henry. "Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity."

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men

love with your eyes, if you ever love at all."

We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."

"I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure." "And found it, Mr. Gray?" "Often. Too often."

"That a burnt child loves the fire." "I am not even singed. My wings are untouched."

"You use them for everything, except

flight." "Courage has passed from men to women. It is a new experience for us." "...

but now and then a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded.

Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.

Out of the black cave

of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.

Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. Besides,

them that the subject is to be tabooed. As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

has just died is better off than I am. I have no terror of death. It is the coming of death that terrifies me. Its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me.

"It is an annoying subject," broke in Lord Henry. "It has no psychological value at all. Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know some one who had committed a real murder."

"Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful."

A cry of joy broke from his lips. The man who had been shot in the thicket was James Vane.

Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it."

"What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?" said the younger man. He watched him intently after he had spoken.

"I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that doesn't suit you. All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder.

"Like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart."

"By the way, Dorian," he said after a pause, "'what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose--how does the quotation run?--his own soul'?"

thought of telling the prophet that art had a soul, but that man had not.

But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play--I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.

He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood--his

rose-white boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it.

"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history." The phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself.

mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him.

Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now.

Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.

Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they

recognized who it was.