The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

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

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

“but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”

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

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. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet.

When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us.

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist,

not of the sitter. 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.

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 did not want any external influence in my life.

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

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

There is nothing that art cannot express,

It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. 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.”

One’s own soul, and the passions of one’s friends—those were the fascinating things in life.

Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not. She said that he was very earnest and had a beautiful nature.

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.

“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. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.

Dorian, like a good boy,”

Nah ( skull emoji )

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.

Was there anything so real as words?

“He has certainly not been paying me compliments. Perhaps that is the reason that I don’t believe anything he has told me.”

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

And beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned.

Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

should like that awfully.” The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture.