Quotes

Preface

• All art is quite useless.

Chapter One

• "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
• "There is a fatality obout 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."
• "Your wealth and rank, 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."
• " I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one things that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it."
• "Those who are faithful only know the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies."
• How delightful other people's emotions were!--much more delightful than their ideas.

Chapter Two

• "The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for."
• "The bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself."
• "We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also."
• Was there anything so real as words?
• "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
• "Beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight or spring time, or the reflection in dark waters of this silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has it's divine rights of sovereignty."
• "I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it."

Chapter Three

• "She behaves as if she were beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm."
• Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
• There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence...to project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment...there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.
• "I can sympathize with everything except suffering...It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with color, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the better."
• "Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin."

Chapter Four

• "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
• "The people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people...The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid others would pick them up."
• "The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are."
• Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil is drawn away. Sometimes this was effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature...but now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art.
• He was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses.
• Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes...All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past.

Chapter Five

• Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older, they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Chapter Six

• "I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices."
• “No life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.”
• "To be good is to be in harmony with one's self. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others."
• "Modern morality consists in the accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality."
• "Whatever
  
  ask for they had first given to us. They create love in our natures. They have a right to demand it back."

Chapter Seven

• There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
• "Tonight, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I have always played. Tonight, for the first time, I became conscious...that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the word I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were something of which all art is but a reflection."
• There is always something ridiculous about the emotions whom one has ceased to love.
• Women were better to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions.

Chapter Eight

• The portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to 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.
• "So I have murdered Sibyl Vane...murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for all of that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden...How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears. "
• "Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity...They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account."
• "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."
• "What is it that has really happened? Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life."
• "One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar."
• "The charm of the past is that it's the past."
• "Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history."
• "How different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the women one meets! There is something to me quite beautiful about her death. I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen. They make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with, such as romance, passion, and love."
• "I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters all the same."
• "The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are."

Chapter Nine

• "I am different, but you must not like me less. I am changed, but you must always be my friend."
• "It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him."

Chapter Ten

• The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.
• "I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference." "Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry.

Chapter Eleven

• There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless...he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish. ..The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.
• 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. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.
• There was to be, as Lord Henry prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.
• We watch the dawn remaking the world...Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
• He never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail.
• Yet...no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
• ...he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.
• Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feel instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals.

Chapter Twelve

• "Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself..."
• "Don't be so indifferent. You have a wonderful influence. Let it be for good, not for evil."

Insights and Observations

• While on some levels I do agree with Wilde's opinion of art and the artist, for the most part he overgeneralizes, and I don't believe his statements still ring true today.
• Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
• There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
• I agree that stupid people have an easier life, but I don't believe that ugly people do, at least not in this time and place. As far as I'm concerned, ugly is an opinion. However, someone who is considered "less attractive" by general American societal standards (unkempt, asymmetrical features, overweight, etc.), are often overlooked, not taken as seriously, or ostracized. On the other end, generally attractive people are sucked up to, offered more special treatment, and given more opportunities. Dumb, attractive people have a much less complicated life than the average-looking intellectual.
• These guys are super gay for each other.
• The more we live and experience life, the more we learn and know and understand, the uglier we become. Wisdom and intelligence ruin physical beauty with the burden of knowledge.
• It is true that a big reason people stay with each other is because they don't want that person to be with someone else. I wonder that about my relationship sometimes, because of how all-encompassing our jealousy can be.
• I feel terrible for Sibyl Vane. It almost makes me want to cry, knowing what love feels like, and what it feels like to have it rejected.
• Dorian must be very naive to not be concerned with the amount of influence Lord Henry has over him. Instead, he is under the impression that Harry has enlightened him of the truths of life. As Lord Henry doesn't live by his philosophies, he is obviously only getting enjoyment out of entertaining this ideas, rather than carrying them out. Basil and his aunt's dinner guests, for example, are more than happy to join Harry in stimulating conversation, but they aren't so convinced as to completely raze and remodel their moral structures. Dorian, however, is blown away by Harry's speeches, which to me says something about his character on a deeper sense than naivety. I think Dorian was already very shallow and selfish to begin with. Lord Henry just created the justification Dorian needed to act on these feelings.
• The death of Sibyl Vane is beautiful in that it is tragic. Many people don't experience something so romantic in their lifetime, but Dorian now has, and very young, and it will undoubtedly change him. It has also strengthened his ego and reaffirmed his faith in his own beauty, which he has now realized as his only worthy aspect.
• We tend to put more trust into conventionally good looking people that those who are not.

Questions

• Outside of marriage, what is the point of fidelity?
• Are Jim's feelings for Sibyl bordering on incestuous?
  • jealousy
  • "kissed her with real affection"
    • brotherly affection?
• Why is it that tragedy can be beautiful? What is it that inspires the appreciation of it?