words of wisdom: The Picture of Dorian Gray

More words that I liked from this book:

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

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.

I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won’t like his tone of colour, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. 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.

Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.

But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

…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 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.

I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it.

I adore simple pleasures … they are the last refuge of the complex.

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. 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! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.

…hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.

…for which he could not account, and which for that reason was all the more dominant within him.

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

To be in love is to surpass one’s self.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.

…the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning…

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.

Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song.

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts and appetite into an art.

His own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm. 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 plenitude.