Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion."
204 Quotes
"His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul brain and power."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"The ugly and 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. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; 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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about 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 give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"every portrait that is painted 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 coloured canvas, reveals himself."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. 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. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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