The Picture of Dorian Gray (Original 1891 Edition): Annotated

by Oscar Wilde

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

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.

"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 in it the secret of my own soul."

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

me. I believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality.

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. 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.

He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner.

My heart shall never be put under their microscope.

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

Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses:

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

"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.

development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.

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 are the two things that govern us.

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—

regret. 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.

And beauty is a form of genius— is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world,

It has its divine right of sovereignty.

A new Hedonism— that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.

thisssss

With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season… . The moment I met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be.

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. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!"

words. The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before.

But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!"

Painting reference

I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose?

If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now!

it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!"

"At least you are like it in appearance. But it will never alter,"

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic."

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.

advice." Lord Henry smiled. "People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

"The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

He is not like other men. He would never bring misery upon any one. His nature is too fine for that."

I have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women.

you will feel that the man who could wrong her would be a beast, a beast without a heart.

"To be good is to be in harmony with one's self,"

Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich."

"Oh! I should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in … well, in the consciousness of degradation."

He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them… . His eyes darkened, and the crowded flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.

To spiritualize one's age—that is something worth doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.

Sibyl Vane

so what does it matter if she plays Juliet like a wooden doll?

The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange. He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?

Painting: After he broke Siby'l heart

In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange. He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?

PAINTING After he broke Sibyl’s heart

Lord Henry had told him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were.

we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities;

Was it all true? Had the portrait really changed? Or had it been simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where there had been a look of joy? Surely a painted canvas could not alter?

Painting