The Picture of Dorian Gray
136 quotes
Biography
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium."
"No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved."
"From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type."
"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 beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think."
"There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live--undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are--my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks--we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly."
"When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it."
"You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties."
"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know."
"I quite sympathize with the rage of the English democracy against what they call the vices of the upper classes. They feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself he is poaching on their preserves."
"But poor Lady Brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. She either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one wants to know."
"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things … Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul."
"As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible."
""You don't understand what friendship is, Harry," he murmured--"or what enmity is, for that matter. You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one"."
"Yes; horribly unjust of you. I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain."
"Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices."
"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
"I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue."
"A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion."
"Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day."
"It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value."
"Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies."
"The worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic."