The Picture of Dorian Gray Quotes

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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." "I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of hi...

The Picture of Dorian Gray

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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 hi...

The Picture of Dorian Gray

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play wit...

The Picture of Dorian Gray

It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of...

The Picture of Dorian Gray

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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 e...

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other ...

The Picture of Dorian Gray

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. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid....

The Picture of Dorian Gray

People say sometimes that Beauty is 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 Picture of Dorian Gray

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

The Picture of Dorian Gray