The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.” (5)
I know that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. (6)
“He is all my art to me now.” (9)
“There is nothing that Art cannot express…” (9)
“The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void.” (9)
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses by the soul.” (19)
“You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.” (19)
“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.” (24)
He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. (41)
“Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.” (43)
“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a a confession of failure. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.” (45)
“I get hungry for her presence; and when I think of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in the little ivory body, I am filled with awe.” (50)
Out of its secret hiding place had crept his soul, and desire had come to meet it on the way. (50)
“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.”(51)
“The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.” (68)
“It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. 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.” (92)
Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. (119)
“When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.” (164)
“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.” (182)
