The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

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

It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him.

And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.

Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be.

He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety.

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.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them,

The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be borne.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”

If we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors.

“What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!” exclaimed Lord Henry. “A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.”

“I like men who have a future and women who have a past,”

“Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.”

The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts.

“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”

“I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.”

“anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.”

Of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits.

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.”

“If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart,”

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.

You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play—I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.