The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.

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.

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

I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.

He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world.

He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.

He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.

Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it.

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.

Lord Henry laughed. ‘If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart,’ he answered, sinking into an arm-chair. Dorian Gray shook his head, and struck some soft chords on the piano. ‘“Like the painting of a sorrow,”’ he repeated, ‘“a face without a heart.”’