The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

He would seek to dominate him—had already, indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own.

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

that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears.

lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results.

He thought of his friend’s young fiery-coloured life and wondered how it was all going to end.

She had sent her soul to search for him, and it had brought him back.

Your portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal appearance of other people.

He would be a wonderful study.”

When I am with her, I regret all that you have taught me.

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

You are more to me than all art can ever be.

One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth.

Meaning the real him is becoming more cruel?

Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?

Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized?—that what it dreamed, they made true?

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.

I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”

The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.

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

She passed again into the sphere of art.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.

loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

It was a poisonous book.

he never sought to free himself from it.

nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control.

There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished.

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 think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare.

sought to “make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty.”

It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it.

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

was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things.

modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.

His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they were determined to discover his secret.

Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.

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

Chapter 11: “pure gothicism. it is wilde distracting the reader just like dorian is distracting himself from his sins”

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 chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look on it face to face.”

“I was wrong. It has destroyed me.”

I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.”

“It is too late, Basil,”

suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his ear by those grinning lips.

The friend who had painted the fatal portrait to which all his misery had been due had gone out of his life. That was enough.

kept his own curious disguises,

Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward.

wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible it was!—more

the thing

Those finely shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness.

felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.

But at dinner he could not eat anything. Plate after plate went away untasted.