The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

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

A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows.

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. 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.”

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides

It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.”

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

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

He is all my art to me now,”

I won’t tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

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.”

The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing.

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.”

No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.”

“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.

“I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.

The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.

Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. 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.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!

Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

“You are quite right to do that,” he murmured. “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.

Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.

A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season. . . .

The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth.

I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way! 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!”

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!”

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing.

and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.”

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.”

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin.

What a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade!

There was something fascinating in this son of love and death.

“They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,”

Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.”

“I want him to play to me,”

“I can sympathize with everything except suffering,”

One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores, the better.”

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.”

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.”