The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

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

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

she is a peacock in everything but beauty,”

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us.

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

He stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation.

Enlightenment, only in the wrong direction.

“How sad it is! 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!”

He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox.

the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

To be in love is to surpass one’s self.

“The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.

“Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about,”

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.

would not, at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil Hallward’s garden had first stirred within him the passion for impossible things.

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.

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he ...

“why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?

It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.

too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them. .

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. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.

“Something of a load to carry, sir,”

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence.

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.

There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape;

a new Hedonism

It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience.

Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing.

Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.

seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.

and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up—he was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things. He, at any rate, had escaped that.

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face.

One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends.

He seemed to recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his own design.

Then, suddenly, time stopped for him. Yes: that blind, slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made him stone.

under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas.

From time to time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it.

They were better off than he was.

He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm.

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

but now and then a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.

And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them visible form, and make them move before one!