Picture of Dorian Gray

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

But beauty, real beauty, end where intellectual expression begins. İntellect is in itself a made exaggeration, and destroys the harmony in any face.

The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.

To get back one’s youth one has merely to repeat one’s fallacies.

You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure. Faithfulness! The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that other might pick them up.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they figure them.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The boss of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbors with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.

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. To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self.

I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.

Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.

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 sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I dont want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

And you are awfully unjust Basil. You came down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person.

But it appeared to Dorain 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.

He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the senses of life.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

I assure you, we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.

With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.

“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.