The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

Aestheticism’s first martyr at the hands of life was not Dorian Gray. It was Oscar Wilde himself.

But Beauty, real Beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

Bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and consequently he always looks absolutely delightful.

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown with it the secret of my own soul.”

she is a peacock in everything but beauty,”

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

I see him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and the subtleties of certain colours.

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.

The worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

“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. To realise one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it—and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating,—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.

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

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