66. the PICTURE of DORIAN GRAY

Oscar Wilde 1891

Would you sell your soul for the promise of everlasting youth and beauty? Enchanted by his stunning portrait, Dorian Gray did. As he descends into the path of ultimate moral degradation, he remained youthful and beautiful... but his soul and his portait did not.

'In the center of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward...'(4)

'The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and grape 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. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor even receive it from alien hands.'(6)

"Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul."(7)

'I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.'(10)

'Dorian Gray is to me simply a motive in art. You might see nothing in him. I see everything in him., He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colors. That is all.'(13)

'Because 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.'(20)

'Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. (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 springtime, 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.'(24)

'If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that--I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!(28)

'When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always end by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.'(56)

'Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.'(82)

'She crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, and Dorian Gray with his beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiseled lips curled in exquisite disdain. There is always something ridiculous about the emotion of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic.'(92)

'But the picture? What was he to day of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?(95)

'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 back where they have no account.'(104)

'For these treasure, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be 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. Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation f his life...'(144)

'When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.'(183)

'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.'(201)

'You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. 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.'(224)
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a Barnes and Noble Classic edition
244 pages
Book owned
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Personal note: Thanks to Bethany at Words, Words, Words for her review of the book and the promise of a million quotes.