The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

“Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.”

Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.”

I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare’s plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare’s music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.

pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”

“I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”

Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him.

Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.

He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.

How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.

There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions.

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

“The dead linger sometimes.

Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.

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.

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. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.

wish I could love,” cried Dorian Gray with a deep note of pathos in his voice. “But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself. My own personality has become a burden to me. I want to escape, to go away, to forget.

“I wish I knew,” she said at last. He shook his head. “Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.” “One may lose one’s way.” “All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys.” “What is that?” “Disillusion.” “It was my debut in life,”

Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it.” “Why?” said the younger man wearily. “Because,” said Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt trellis of an open vinaigrette box, “one can survive everything nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

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

“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”