The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

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.

"every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

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

There is nothing that art cannot express,

We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

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

Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.