The Picture of Dorian Gray
favourite quotes
"...I don't propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world." -Lord Henry
"I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art..." -Basil
"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." -Lord Henry
"Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies." -Lord Henry
"...To influence a person it 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. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for." -Lord Henry
"...Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, 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." -Lord Henry
"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic." -Narration
"There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims." -Narration
" 'I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American dry-goods store,' Said Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious.
'My uncle has already suggested pork-packing, Sir Thomas.'
'Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?' asked the Duchess, raising her large hands in wonder, and accentuating the verb.
'American novels,' answered Lord Henry..."
" 'How dreadful!' cried Lord Henry. 'I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.'
'I do not understand you,' said Sir Thomas, growing rather red.
'I do, Lord Henry,' murmured Mr Erskine, with a smile."
"Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of intellect - simply a confession of failure." -Lord Henry
"Good artists exist 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 that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize." -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." -Lord Henry
As you may have noticed, most of these quotes are from Lord Henry, who I fondly think of as Oscar Wilde himself. I feel if any movie had done the novel justice, then Lord Henry would top many of the most dangerously-influential character charts. Right next to Tyler Durden and V.
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