Miscellanies

Finally, let me say this—the æsthetic movement produced certain curious colours, subtle in their loveliness and fascinating in their almost mystical tone. They were, and are, our reaction against the crude primaries of a doubtless more respectable but certainly less cultivated age. My story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the crude brutality of plain realism. It is poisonous if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at.—I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, OSCAR WILDE

The opinions of the old on matters of Art are, of course, of no value whatsoever. The artistic instincts of the young are invariably fascinating;

Dorian Gray has not got a cool, calculating, conscienceless character at all. On the contrary, he is extremely impulsive, absurdly romantic, and is haunted all through his life by an exaggerated sense of conscience which mars his pleasures for him and warns him that youth and enjoyment are not everything in the world.

The real moral of the story is that all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its punishment, and this moral is so far artistically and deliberately suppressed that it does not enunciate its law as a general principle, but realises itself purely in the lives of individuals, and so becomes simply a dramatic element in a work of art, and not the object of the work of art itself.

a mystery that, like all other mysteries, I hope some day to explore

The painter, Basil Hallward, worshipping physical beauty far too much, as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity.  Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself.  Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life.  He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.

it is always difficult, even for the most modest of us, to remember that other people do not know quite as much as one does one’s self.

I think that puppies are extremely interesting from an artistic as well as from a psychological point of view.

I think I may say without vanity—though I do not wish to appear to run vanity down—that of all men in England I am the one who requires least advertisement.  I am tired to death of being advertised—I feel no thrill when I see my name in a paper.  The chronicle does not interest me any more.