O! Wilde Wild Words ..
You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
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."
It is better not to be different from one's fellows.
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. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands.
When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.
The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
I believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
You don't understand what friendship is, or what enmity is, for that matter. You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.
I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.
Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing. "Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
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 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. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.
They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes
to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry
and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.
The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God,
which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us.
And yet
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.
Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things
it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous
laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said
that the great events of the world take place in the brain.
It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins
of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself,
with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had
passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have fined you
with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might
stain your cheek with shame--
Words! Mere words!How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could
not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!
They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things,
And 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. It makes princes of those who have it.
You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile.
. . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.
That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial
as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Credit is the capital of a younger son,and one lives charmingly upon it.
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
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
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray,
and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.
To get back one's youth,one has merely to repeat one's follies.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
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.
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
It is personalities, not principles, that move the age.
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
Women defend themselves by attacking,just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they
judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.
And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.
Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex.
They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos.
They are forced to have more than one life. They become more
highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy,
the object of man's existence. Besides, every experience
is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage,
it is certainly an experience.
To be good is to be in harmony with one's self.When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good,we are not always happy.
I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford
nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things,
are the privilege of the rich.
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him
so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
If you had married this girl, you would have been wretched.
Fatality about good resolutions--that they are always made too late.
The people who have adored me--there have not been very many,
but there have been some--have always insisted on living on,
long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
One should absorb the colour of life,but one should never remember its details. Details are always
vulgar
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.
We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us
a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy
in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing,
it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world
that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure,
a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours,
and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past
would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate,
in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance
even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure
their pain.
Amongst the true objects, of life;
and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful,
and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance,
he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences,
and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference
that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that,
indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition
of it.
When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again,it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs."
Women love us for our defects.If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything,
even our intellects.
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Moderation is a fatal thing.Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast
The senses, no less than the soul,have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
To cure the soul by means of the senses,and the senses by means of the soul.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses
but the soul.
I am sick of women who love one.
Women who hate one are much more interesting.
I believe in the race," she cried.
"It represents the survival of the pushing."
"It has development."
"Decay fascinates me more."
"What of art?" she asked.
"It is a malady."
"Love?"
"An illusion."
"Religion?"
"The fashionable substitute for belief."
"You are a sceptic."
"Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith."
"What are you?"
"To define is to limit."
Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy.
To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
Women rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities.
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men
love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an
appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is
the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does
not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.
We can have in life but one great experience at best,
and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often
as possible.
I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness?
I have searched for pleasure.
How fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed Lord Henry.
"It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman
will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are
looking on.
The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty.
Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it.One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no
opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one
cannot explain away.
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. I should fancy that
crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring
extraordinary sensations.
anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. That is one of the most important secrets
of life.One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality
of faith, and the lesson of romance.
Life is not governed by will or intention.
Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up
cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance
tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume
that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it,
a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again,
a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play--
I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine
them for us. There are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes
suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life
over again.
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."
It is better not to be different from one's fellows.
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. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands.
When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.
The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
I believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm.
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
You don't understand what friendship is, or what enmity is, for that matter. You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.
I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.
Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing. "Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
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 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. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.
They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes
to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry
and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.
The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God,
which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us.
And yet
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.
Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things
it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous
laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said
that the great events of the world take place in the brain.
It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins
of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself,
with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had
passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have fined you
with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might
stain your cheek with shame--
Words! Mere words!How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could
not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!
They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things,
And 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. It makes princes of those who have it.
You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile.
. . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.
That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial
as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
Credit is the capital of a younger son,and one lives charmingly upon it.
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
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
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray,
and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.
To get back one's youth,one has merely to repeat one's follies.
Punctuality is the thief of time.
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
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.
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
It is personalities, not principles, that move the age.
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
Women defend themselves by attacking,just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they
judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.
And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.
Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex.
They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos.
They are forced to have more than one life. They become more
highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy,
the object of man's existence. Besides, every experience
is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage,
it is certainly an experience.
To be good is to be in harmony with one's self.When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good,we are not always happy.
I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford
nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things,
are the privilege of the rich.
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him
so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
If you had married this girl, you would have been wretched.
Fatality about good resolutions--that they are always made too late.
The people who have adored me--there have not been very many,
but there have been some--have always insisted on living on,
long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
One should absorb the colour of life,but one should never remember its details. Details are always
vulgar
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.
We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us
a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy
in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing,
it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world
that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure,
a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours,
and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past
would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate,
in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance
even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure
their pain.
Amongst the true objects, of life;
and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful,
and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance,
he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences,
and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference
that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that,
indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition
of it.
When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again,it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs."
Women love us for our defects.If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything,
even our intellects.
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
I like men who have a future and women who have a past.
Moderation is a fatal thing.Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast
The senses, no less than the soul,have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
To cure the soul by means of the senses,and the senses by means of the soul.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses
but the soul.
I am sick of women who love one.
Women who hate one are much more interesting.
I believe in the race," she cried.
"It represents the survival of the pushing."
"It has development."
"Decay fascinates me more."
"What of art?" she asked.
"It is a malady."
"Love?"
"An illusion."
"Religion?"
"The fashionable substitute for belief."
"You are a sceptic."
"Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith."
"What are you?"
"To define is to limit."
Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy.
To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
Women rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities.
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men
love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an
appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is
the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does
not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.
We can have in life but one great experience at best,
and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often
as possible.
I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness?
I have searched for pleasure.
How fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed Lord Henry.
"It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman
will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are
looking on.
The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty.
Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it.One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no
opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one
cannot explain away.
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. I should fancy that
crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring
extraordinary sensations.
anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. That is one of the most important secrets
of life.One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality
of faith, and the lesson of romance.
Life is not governed by will or intention.
Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up
cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance
tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume
that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it,
a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again,
a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play--
I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine
them for us. There are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes
suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life
over again.
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