The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

“All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.”

If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation.”

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

“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”

“My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”

She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen in my life. You said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears.

Why should I not love her? Harry, I do love her. She is everything to me in life. Night after night I go to see her play. One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. I have seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover’s lips. I have watched her wandering through the forest of Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap. She has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king, and given him rue to wear and bitter herbs to taste of. She has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her reedlike throat. I have seen her in every age and in every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious. But an actress! How different an actress is! Harry! why didn’t you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?”

“Harry! Sibyl Vane is sacred!”

“It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian,”

To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.

I want to make Romeo

jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

She will make the world as mad as she has made me.

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

“Money, Mother?” she cried, “what does money matter? Love is more than money.”

“We don’t want him any more, Mother. Prince Charming rules life for us now.”

I love him because he is like what love himself should be.

Mother, did you love my father as I love Prince Charming?”

you are far too young to think of falling in love. Besides, what do you know of this young man? You don’t even know his name.

I hope that Dorian Gray will make this girl his wife, passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become fascinated by some one else. He would be a wonderful study.”

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves.

When you see Sibyl Vane, you will feel that the man who could wrong her would be a beast, a beast without a heart. I cannot understand how any one can wish to shame the thing he loves. I love Sibyl Vane.

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

Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.

Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.”

“Don’t talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more wonderful thing than art.”

“They are both simply forms of imitation,”

before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!—and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You had made me understand what love really is. My love! My love! Prince Charming! Prince of life! I have grown sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be.

you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You don’t know what you were to me, once.

How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.”

Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl’s fault, not his. He had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him.

The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would resist temptation. He would not see Lord Henry any more

He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends, marry her, try to love her again. Yes, it was his duty to do so. She must have suffered more than he had. Poor child!

he felt that it had done for him. It had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane.

I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us.

Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl.

If you had married this girl, you would have been wretched. Of course, you would have treated her kindly. One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions—that they are always made too late.

Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life.

But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art. You are more fortunate than I am. I assure you, Dorian, that not one of the women I have known would have done for me what Sibyl Vane did for you. Ordinary women always console themselves.

Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history.

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don’t waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.”

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

She had often mimicked death on the stage. Then Death himself had touched her and taken her with him.

If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.

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

“You went to the opera while Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging? You can talk to me of other women being charming, and of Patti singing divinely, before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in?

What is done is done. What is past is past.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.