The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.

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

Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“Oh, I can’t explain. 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.

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.”

It was reckless of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him. Perhaps it was not so reckless, after all. It was simply inevitable.

his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style.

The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void.

“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

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.

“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.

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.

that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may

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.

Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. He understood them now. Life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him. It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. Why had he not known it?

“Yes,” continued Lord Henry, “that is one of the great secrets of life—to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

“Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having.”

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”

would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.

would give my soul for that!”

Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life.”

“I can sympathize with everything except suffering,” said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. “I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing.

Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.”

And mind you don’t talk about anything serious. Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be.”

“I hope it is not about myself. I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.”

But position and wealth are not everything.

There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent’s only son and his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James’s Street. He seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with him?”

The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people they slander.

Yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. You have filled them with a madness for pleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You led them there. Yes: you led them there, and yet you can smile, as you are smiling now. And there is worse behind.

You have a wonderful influence. Let it be for good, not for evil.

“You told me you had destroyed it.” “I was wrong. It has destroyed me.”

How horrible that was! Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.

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

“Of course it is true, Lord Henry. If we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be?

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

She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.

“To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.”

He watched them curiously. They moved like monstrous marionettes and made gestures like live things. He hated them.

Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality.

The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song. They were what he needed for forgetfulness. In three days he would be free.

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses.

“You had better confess your sin, for as sure as I am James Vane, you are going to die.”

“How can you say that? I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand, no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.”

“You don’t like your country, then?” she asked. “I live in it.”

“You are a sceptic.” “Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith.”

“What are you?” “To define is to limit.”

Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.