Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray follows a startling bargain between beauty and conscience. Dorian, a breathtakingly handsome young man, sees his portrait and, in a moment of fear and desire, wishes that the painting would bear the marks of age and sin while he remains outwardly perfect. Under the glittering influence of Lord Henry Wotton’s seductive philosophy—pleasure first, consequences never—Dorian tests the wish and finds it horribly true: with each selfish choice, the portrait grows more corrupt while his face stays angelic.
What begins as curiosity becomes a life’s pattern. Love gets treated like a performance; friendship becomes utilitarian; guilt is pushed aside with parties, perfumes, exotic books, and clever talk. Only the artist Basil Hallward, who truly loves Dorian’s goodness, keeps a small window open to better choices. But the longer Dorian stares away from that window, the more the hidden canvas becomes a mirror of his soul. The novel blends glittering salons with locked rooms and midnight streets to ask a simple, unnerving question: What does it profit us to preserve appearances if, in the process, we unmake ourselves?
Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for and always missed.
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyGood God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!… Pray, Dorian, pray… The prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished.
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyIt was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession… Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words.
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyI knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyThere is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all… The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyWe are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us… The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself…
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyYou had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You had made me understand what love really is… Prince of life! I have grown sick of shadows… Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. You have made me see that.
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyWhen we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyYou will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.
fromThe Picture of Dorian GraybyTo cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul!
fromThe Picture of Dorian Grayby