The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wisehouse Classics - with original illustrations by Eugene Dété)

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 daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one’s life.

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.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given.

Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone 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.

feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some

disk, “and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.”

He played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox.