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.

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. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

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

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

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.

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.

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

“Harry,” said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, “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. 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.”

“and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.”

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.”

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.”

there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.

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.

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

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.

“Ah! this morning! You have lived since then.”

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

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

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

How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art!

But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls.

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

If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it.

As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul.

Something has changed you completely. You look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come down to my studio to sit for his picture. But you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. You were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. Now, I don’t know what has come over you. You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you.

The last night she played—the night you saw her—she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art.

There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

How ugly it all was! And how horribly real ugliness made things!

“I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.” “Ah, you have discovered that?” murmured Lord Henry. And they passed into the dining-room.

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.

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

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.”

“Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,”

“By the way, Dorian,” he said after a pause, “‘what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose’—how does the quotation run?—‘his own soul?’”

Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not “Forgive us our sins” but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the prayer of man to a most just God.

“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”

When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.