cody coyle’s Reviews > The Picture of Dorian Gray > Status Update

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination thag made each crime bear its misshapen brood.

To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence.

Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have the charm of a flirtation. Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

There were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. 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.

This book just reminded me that I read The Portrait by Gogol a long time ago. Wow and The Nose. I need to reread those short stories they were crazy. I have an actual novel by Gogol, Dead Souls, that I’m gonna read soon

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade-name if the firm. That is all.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.