Oscar Wilde quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray #8

Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history.

Conscience makes egotists of us all.

I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened.

I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists.

To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

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.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

[P]erhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.

The more he knew, the more he desired to know.

And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence.

But it appeared to Dorian 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.

So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape[.]

[T]he remembrance even of joy [has] its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.

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 (…). Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One's own life--that is the important thing. As for the lives of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern.

Besides, individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

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