The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories Quotes

“The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice last a little longer.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories

“It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled, lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the “panis cælestis,” the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming censers that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their subtle fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories

“Cuando nos culpamos sentimos que nadie mas tiene derecho a hacerlo. Es la confesión, no el sacerdote, lo que nos da la absolución.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories

“Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour—that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories