• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written, or badly written. That is all.
  • All art is quite useless.
  • I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us.
  • You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him.
  • Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times. But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
  • Man is many things, but he is not rational.
  • Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
  • Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
  • 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.
  • 'Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil,' cried Dorian, with a wild gesture of despair.
  • The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced by some foul puppet on a stand, and grinned through moving masks.
  • The dead linger sometimes.
sep 1 2013 ∞
sep 1 2013 +