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What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
"but 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. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.
You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."
none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic."
"Dorian Gray is my dearest friend," he said. "He has a simple and a beautiful nature. Your aunt was quite right in what she said of him. Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.
There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world.
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They
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"No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.
They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.
When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional."
"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different."
"that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."
She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church.
I always hear Harry's views from his friends. It is the only way I get to know of them.
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."
There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies."
He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice."
"People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."
"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense.
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
Yes, the lad was premature. He was gathering his harvest while it was yet spring. The pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was becoming self-conscious. It was delightful to watch him. With his beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at. It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end. He was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses.
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
wondering at the harsh simplicity of life.
The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid to her.
"Dorian says she is beautiful, and he is not often wrong about things of that kind.
We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.
"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.
Of course, it is sudden—all really delightful things are.
I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."
A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the crowded flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.
She is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience. There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
He flung himself down on the sofa and turned away his face. "You have killed my love," he muttered.
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
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.
How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar."
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
"You have explained me to myself, Harry,"
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 call yesterday the past?"
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions.
