The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.

All art is quite useless.

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

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.

He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him.”

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

“I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry,”

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.

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.

He, too, felt that we were destined to know each other.

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

“Dorian Gray is to me simply a motive in art. You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him. He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there.

“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.

“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

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.”

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty.

Harry, don’t talk like that. As long as I live, the personality of Dorian Gray will dominate me. You can’t feel what I feel. You change too often.”

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.

Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not.

Don’t take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses:

All influence is immoral

to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.

He becomes an echo of some one else’s music,

Life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him. It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire.

but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression.

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

“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.

People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away.

When your youth goes, your beauty wil...

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

A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants.

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”

I would give my soul for that!

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it.

“Appreciate it? I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself. I feel that.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

I don’t want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that,

and I never pay mine.

“She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.”

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.”

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.”

There was something fascinating in this son of love and death.

“They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,

“Only when one is young,”