The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

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

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

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

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

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.

Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them.

the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

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.”

I turned half-way round and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

I had a strange feeling that fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows.

she is a peacock in everything but beauty,”

Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we were destined to know each other.”

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

“Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.”

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.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me.

Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. 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.

My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing,

I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said.

Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.”

What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

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

Don’t

spoil him. Don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. Don’t take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.

Lord Henry looked at him. Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair.

One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.

Dorian’s whims are laws to everybody, except himself.”

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.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

“Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.

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!”

Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”

what is this humbug your father tells me about Dartmoor wanting to marry an American? Ain’t English girls good enough for him?” “It is rather fashionable to marry Americans

I am told that pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after politics.”

So that was the story of Dorian Gray’s parentage. Crudely as it had been told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance. A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man.

Lord Henry laughed. “I don’t desire to change anything in England except the weather,”

“To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them,

I never talk during music—at least, during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation.”

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.”

“My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”