one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could

“I should have objected very strongly this morning, Lord Henry.” “Ah! this morning! You have lived since then.”

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.

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.”

“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. The aim of life is

laughed. “I don’t desire to change anything in England except the weather,” he answered. “I am quite content with philosophic contemplation. But, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure of sympathy, I would suggest that we should appeal to Science to put us straight. The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us

“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.”

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.