The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

“Laughter is not at all a bad be­gin­ning for a friend­ship, and it is far the best end­ing for one,”

Those who find beau­ti­ful mean­ings in beau­ti­ful things are the cul­tiv­ated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beau­ti­ful things mean only beauty

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

I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emo­tions. I want to use them, to en­joy them, and to dom­in­ate them.

“Be­cause to in­flu­ence a per­son is 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 someone else’s mu­sic, an actor of a part that has not been writ­ten for him.

Be­hind every ex­quis­ite thing that ex­is­ted, there was some­thing tra­gic.

only ex­cuse for mak­ing a use­less thing is that one ad­mires it in­tensely.
All art is quite use­less.
Os­car Wilde.