All art is at once surface and symbol.
3
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
4
“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.”
6, Lord Henry
“Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any farce. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then again in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.”
6-7, Lord Henry
“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.”
8, Lord Henry
“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.”
10, Lord Henry
“You don’t understand what friendship is, Harry,” he murmured—“or what enmity is, for that matter. You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”
12, Basil Hallward
“What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”
16, Lord Henry
“Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not.”
17, Lord Henry
“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 his life out 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 among 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, or the 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.”
21, Lord Henry
“And Beauty is a form of Genius,—is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.”
24, Lord Henry
“I adore simple pleasures,” said Lord Henry. “They are the last refuge of the complex.”
30, Lord Henry
“Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.”
37, Lord Henry
“They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,” chuckled Sir Thomas, who has a large wardrobe of Humour’s cast-off clothes.
“Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?” inquired the Duchess.
“They go to America,” murmured Lord Henry.
40
He thought for a moment. “Can you remember any great error that you committed in your early days, Duchess?” he asked, looking at her across the table.
“A great many, I fear,” she cried.
“Then commit them again,” he said gravely. “To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”
42, Lord Henry & the Duchess of Monmouth
“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.”
54, Lord Henry
“Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exists 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 he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
57, Lord Henry
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.
59
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
67
“He wants to enslave you.”
“I shudder at the thought of being free.”
“I want you to beware of him.”
“To see him is to worship him; to know him is to trust him.”
68, Sibyl Vane & James Vane
“The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. All unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.”
74, Lord Henry
“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.”
75, Lord Henry
“Don’t talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more wonderful thing than art.”
“They are both simply forms of imitation,” remarked Lord Henry.
84, Basil Hallward & Lord Henry
“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”
85, Lord Henry
“That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”
101, Lord Henry
“You must not tell me about things. What is done is done. What is past is past.”
“You call yesterday the past?”
“What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? 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. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
68, Dorian Gray & Basil Hallward
“She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played—the night you saw her—she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art. There is something of the martyr about her.”
109, Dorian Gray
“To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.”
110, Dorian Gray
“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.”
114, Basil Hallward
“Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words.”
115, Basil Hallward
The love that he bore him—for it was really love—had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michelangelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.
118
“The book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the time was going.”
“Yes, I thought you would like it,” replied his host, rising from his chair.
“I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”
125, Dorian Gray & Lord Henry
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 wit hthe less highly organized forms of existence.
129
Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
141
There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.
144
“You told me you had destroyed it.”
“I was wrong. It had destroyed me.”
“I don’t believe it is my picture.”
“Can’t you see your ideal in it?” said Dorian bitterly.
“My ideal, as you call it...”
“As you called it.”
“There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr.”
“It is the face of my soul.”
“Christ! What a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a devil.”
“Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil,” cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.
154, Basil Hallward & Dorian Gray
Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.
172
“Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.”
“Fin de siècle,” murmured Lord Henry.
“Fin du globe,” answered his hostess.
176, Lady Narborough & Lord Henry
The inherited stupidity of the race—sound English common sense he jovially termed it—was shown to be the proper bulwark for society.
177
“She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the cold of the image precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences.”
178, Lord Henry
Ugliness was the one reality.
183
“Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys. You, as a good Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.”
“You don’t like your country, then?” she asked.
“I live in it.”
“Then you may censure it the better.”
191, Lord Henry & the Duchess of Monmouth
“Decay fascinates me more.”
“What of art?” she asked.
“It is a malady.”
“Love?”
“An illusion.”
“Religion?”
“The fashionable substitute for belief.”
“You are a sceptic.”
“Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith.”
“What are you?”
“To define is to limit.”
192, Lord Henry & the Duchess of Monmouth
“To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”
“Not with women,” said the Duchess, shaking her head; “and women rule the world. I assure you we can’t bear our mediocrities. We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.”
193, Lord Henry & the Duchess of Monmouth
“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.”
193, Lord Henry
“You had better take care. He is very fascinating.”
“If he were not, there would be no battle.”
“Greek meets Greek, then?”
“I am on the side of the Trojans. They fought for a woman.”
“They were defeated.”
“There are worse things than capture,” she answered.
194, Lord Henry & the Duchess of Monmouth
“Ah! You must suit your frock to his flowers, Gladys.”
“That would be a premature surrender.”
“Romantic art begins with its climax.”
“I must keep an opportunity for retreat.”
“In the Parthian manner?”
“They found safety in the desert. I could not do that.”
“Women are not always allowed a choice.”
195, Lord Henry & the Duchess of Monmouth
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terrible logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. 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.
197
“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”
“One may lose one’s way.”
“All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys.”
“What is that?”
“Disillusion.”
203, Lord Henry & the Duchess of Monmouth
“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.”
207, Lord Henry
“If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.”
212, Lord Henry
“The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.”
213, Lord Henry
“The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.”
213, Lord Henry
“The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It will always worship you.”
214, Lord Henry
“Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.”
215, Lord Henry
His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.
217
He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that it meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
219-220