the picture of dorian gray

Content
Wikipedia sums it up quite nicely:

The novel tells of a young man named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is impressed by Dorian’s beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil’s garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil’s, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry’s world view. Espousing a new hedonism, Lord Henry suggests the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than himself. Dorian’s wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.

Style
I can’t remember reading a book so slowly, so carefully. Every sentence feels like a precious truth made of glass. I tend to highlight sentences or paragraphs I like with a red pencil – the book is a red mess. Especially the very philosophical, contradictory and hedonistic character Lord Henry Wotton is a source of ingenious inspiration.
Wow. The downside of reading this book is the depression following afterwards, because you will soon realize that “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde. Oh cruel world!

Rating
1

(You get the book for ridiculous 2.40€ on Amazon - no shipping costs.)

Quotes

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

One charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet – we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together – we tell each other the monst absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it – much better than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she finds me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me.

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. Is that very vain of me?

I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no princples better than anything else in the world.

I think you are wrong, but I won’t argue. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

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

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.

The post on her left was occupied by Mr Erskine of Treadley, and old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everyhing that he had to say before he was thirty.

I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the truimph of mind over morals.

You will always be in love with love.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid the others might pick them up.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and always ends by deceiving others.

Human life – that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect – to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord – there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! [...] He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

Unselfish people are colourless.

Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about. 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 oneself. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life – that is the important thing.

If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

The real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

All sins, as theologicans weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.

Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. That is one of the most important secrets of life. I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.

To get back youth I would do anything, except take exercise, get up early or be respectable.

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.