The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

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

have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us.

If I did, I would lose all my pleasure.

Wait no i get it

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 did not want any external influence in my life. You know yourself, Harry, how independent I am by nature. I have always been my own master; had at

Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”

lionize

“My dear fellow, she tried to found a salon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant.

Funny

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

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

the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is

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

What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Henry. “Because, without intending it, I have

He shall never know anything about it. But the world might guess it,

My heart shall never be put under their microscope.

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

I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said.

little out of drawing,

You can’t feel what I feel. You change too often.”

summed up the world in a phrase.

I am bound to state

The world is wide,

Hellenic

rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood,

Harry has been saying to you, but he has certainly made

languorous

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

Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

We degenerate into hideous puppets,

stellated

caprice

panegyric

pallid

egad,

plaintively.

has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure of sympathy,

If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.”

creeping common sense,

made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox.

purple bubbles,

He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination.

PEffor.er

quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.”

Experience was of no ethical value.

foolish child!” was the parrot-phrase flung in answer. The waving of crooked, false-jewelled fingers gave grotesqueness

espial

He has preached me as a dogma;