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.
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.
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
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
I am happy in my prison of passion
I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words
It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.
Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry. Except in America, rejoined Lord Henry, languidly.
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. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.
The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.
Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
Dorian Gray frowned and turned his head away. He could not help liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. His romantic, olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him. There was something in his low languid voice that was absolutely fascinating. His cool, white, flowerlike hands, even, had a curious charm. They moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their own. But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid.
I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. 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. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.
I never take any notice to what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world
Most people are boring and stupid.
The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
To be good is to be in harmony with ones self. Discord is to be forces to be in harmony with others.
With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. Well, after I had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious academicians, I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me.
Any man can be happy with any woman, so long as he doesn't love her.
Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.
I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.
I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life…
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.
The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.
The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. A grasshopper began to chirp by the wall, and like a blue thread a long, thin dragonfly floated past on its brown gauze wings. Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward's heart beating, and wondered what was coming.
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.
Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
Eu adoro prazeres triviais. São o último refúgio do complexo.
I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.
It was an ill-omened place. Death walked there in the sunlight.
No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself
The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth.
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
As he looked back upon man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose!...Hedonism... was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is but itself a moment.
Even things that are true can be proved.
I asked the question for the best reason possible, for the only reason, indeed, that excuses anyone for asking any question - simple curiosity.
I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.
Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid
There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the 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.
Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh new school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. 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. Harry! If only you knew what Dorian Gray is to me!
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories