Selected Quotations From The Picture of Dorian Gray
From the Preface:
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or baldy written. That is all.
From Chapter One:
Lord Henry Wotton: “Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.”
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.
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.
Basil Hallward: You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.
Lord Henry: I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade name of the firm.
Basil: “We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.”
Lord Henry: “It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.
From Chapter Two
Lord Henry: “Nothing can cure the soul except the sense, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
Narrator, of Dorian: “He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some though that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield.”
Lord Henry: “The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”
“Ah this morning! You have lived since then.”
From Chapter Three
Lord Henry: “Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.”
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
The Narrator, of Lord Henry: He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat’s black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation.
From Chapter Four
Narrator: “Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.”
Lord Henry: “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.”
Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.”
It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian.
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.
Dorian: “She [an actress] is more than an individual.”
Lord Henry: “The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
The narrator: “It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.”
From Chapter Six:
Lord Henry: “The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colorless. They lack individuality.”
From Chapter Seven:
Dorian: “How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art.”
Narrator, of Dorian’s thoughts: “His life was well worth hers. She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her an age.”
From Chapter Eight:
Narrator, of Dorian: “[His guardians] did not realize that we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.”
Dorian: “I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”
Lord Henry: “One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”
“I once wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic mourning for a romance that would not die. Ultimately, however, it did die. I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror of eternity.”
If they [women] were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.
The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died…The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away….She was less real than they [the characters she played] are.
Narrator, of Dorian: “And yet, Who, that knew anything about Life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young?”
From Chapter Nine
Dorian: “It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.”
It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.”
Basil: “Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words.”
From Chapter Ten
Narrator, on Dorian: “ The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was ineveitable.”
Narrator, about Dorian’s reading material: “There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in color.”
Dorian: “I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”
From Chapter Eleven
Narrator: “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.”
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 caelestis,” 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.
But 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.
It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us.
From Chapter Fourteen
Narrator: “But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.”
From Chapter Fifteen
Narrator: “Perhaps one never seesm so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.”
Lady Narborough, on her country relatives: “They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.”
From Chapter Sixteen:
The narrator expressing Dorian’s thoughts on opium smokers: “He knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy.”
From Chapter Seventeen:
Lord Henry: “Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with word. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.”
I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But….it is better to be good than to be ugly.
Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.”
Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure.
“Describe as as a sex,” was her challenge[ to Lord Henry]. “Sphinxes without secrets.”
Lord Henry: “Romantic Art begins with its climax.”
From Chapter Eighteen:
Narrator: “Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.”
Lord Henry: “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
Dorian: “I have no terror of Death. It is the coming of Death that terrifies me.”
From Chapter Nineteen:
“My dear boy,” said Lord Henry, smiling, “anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.”
Lord Henry: “Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often.”
If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
N.B. The narrative ends with the twentieth chapter.
