The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. OSCAR WILDE

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

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

It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

lionize

truculent

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”

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

idolatry,

“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 realize 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.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

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

When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been fulfilled?

But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul?

digging up the past, and raking up the future.

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

and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.

The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.

no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.

Society—civilized society, at least—is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.

love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.”

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.

One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. 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

“Each of us has heaven and hell in him,

But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”

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

dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible

Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.

He had no curiosity. It was his chief defect.”

Like the painting of a sorrow,’” he repeated, “‘a face without a heart.’”

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act.

wicked people were always very old and very ugly.