Dorian Gray Quotes

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. 3

Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! 3

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." 4

 If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman--always a rash thing to do--he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself. 10

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. 11

I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes." "My heart shall never be put under their microscope. (Basil) 12

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." 13

"Perhaps you will tire sooner than he will. 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. 13

the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic." 14
As long as I live, the personality of Dorian Gray will dominate me. You can't feel what I feel. You change too often." 14
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies." 14
Lord Henry struck a light on a dainty silver case and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and satisfied air, as if he had summed up the world in a phrase. 14
how delightful other people's emotions were!-- much more delightful than their ideas 14

...to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us. 20

"And yet,"

continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eton days,

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream -- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-- to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal,it may be."

"But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. 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, orthe luxury of a regret.

The only way to get rid of a 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. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have fined you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame --" 21

"stop! you bewilder me. I don't know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don't speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think." 21

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul." 23
"that is one of the great secrets of life-- to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know." 23
"And 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 that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. 25
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible." 25
Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age."
"Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. 25
"We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!" 26
"Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer." 27
Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin.
He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow. . . There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: 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. . . 40
The new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was! He remembered something like it in history. Was it not Plato, that artist in thought, who had first analyzed it?
Was it not Buonarotti who had carved it in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence? But in our own century it was strange. . . . Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him--had already, indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own. There was something fascinating in this son of love and death. 41
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the better." 45
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin 45
A blush is very becoming. 46
To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies. 46
...that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." 46
He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. 47
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them. 48
But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. 48

Ah! I have talked quite enough for to-day,"

said Lord Henry, smiling.

"All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to." 49

Punctuality is the thief of time. 50

I used to look at every one who passed me and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. (DG) 54

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failures. 55

Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his soul, and desire had come to meet it on the way. 62

My Notes: Why does the Soul like to hide?

"People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity." 63

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.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. 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." 63
And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.
It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them.
There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord--there was a delight in that!
What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation. 64
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 was drawn away. 65
It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end. 65
He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. 66
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. 66
Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense. 67
 Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders. 72

"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. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me." 84

...unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality." 84
They become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man's existence. Besides, every experience is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience. 84
"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. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. 84
"I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. 84
He would never bring misery upon any one. His nature is too fine for that." 87
"I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question-- simple curiosity. I have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. 87
I cannot understand how any one can wish to shame the thing he loves. (DG) 87
...individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in 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." 88
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit." 90
I love acting. It is so much more real than life. 90
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. 99
...that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins... 102
Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? 103
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. 108
"I am perfectly happy now. I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. (DG) 109
 One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing." 112
"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account." 113
but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar." 114

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. 115

The one charm of the past is that it is the past. 115

Conscience makes egotists of us all. 115

The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all. 119

This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors.
As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. 120
He would be safe. That was everything. 120
"You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. 129
You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes-- too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them...." 129
"Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him." 130
Some love might come across his life, and purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh--  138

"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference."

"Ah, you have discovered that?" 142

In every pleasure, cruelty has its place. 143

His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. 144

There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape;
Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions. 147
Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. 147
it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment. 147
...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. 148
... in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance,
he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it. 149
...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. 150
...he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up. 155
For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne. 158
Is insincerity such a terrible thing?
I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. (DG's opinion). 160
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. 161
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. 165
One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. (Basil). 171
He felt a terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret, and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the hideous memory of what he had done. 173
My Note: Joy at giving others burdens
"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," (DG). 178
He felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation. (DG's thoughts) 181
Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. 213
One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts. 215
"How can you say that? Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 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." (LH to Gladys) 223
"I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure."

"And found it, Mr. Gray?"

"Often. Too often."

The duchess sighed.

"I am searching for peace," 224

In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all. (DG's thoughts). 227
And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them visible form, and make them move before one! What sort of life would his be if, day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep!
...
 Oh! in what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. 228
My Note: repenting...
"The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness." 231

"It is an annoying subject," broke in Lord Henry.

"It has no psychological value at all. Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know some one who had committed a real murder." 233

Basil was not the sort of man to have gone to them. He had no curiosity. It was his chief defect. 242

My Note: how can you be an artist with no curiosity?

I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations." 242

 The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it."

"Do you feel quite sure of that, Dorian?"

"Quite sure."

"Ah! then it must be an illusion. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance. How grave you are! Don't be so serious. What have you or I to do with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given up our belief in the soul." 245

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. 245

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity. Ah, Dorian, how happy you are! What an exquisite life you have had! You have drunk deeply of everything." 246

Besides, Dorian, don't deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams." 246

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. 247
"You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be.  248
Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? 252