The picture of Dorian Gray

I had the book recommended to me by my little brother last year, but I never got around to reading it until now. I haven’t done as much book-reading (though I’ve done plenty of that other stuff) as I’d have liked for the last couple of weeks, but I’m glad I at least got started on this one – it’s a wonderful book!

A few quotes:

1) [...] “beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is 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. Look at the succesful 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.”

2) “You seem to forget that I am married, and the 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 me meet – we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke’s – we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it – much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do.”

3) “You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilised.”

4) “‘I make a great difference between people. 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.’ [...]
‘according to your category I must be merely an acquaintance.’
‘My dear old Basil, you are much more than an acquaintance.’
‘And much less than a friend. A sort of brother, I suppose?’
‘Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.’”

5) “‘I quite sympathise with the rage of the English democracy against what they call the vices of the upper orders. The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if anyone of us makes an ass of himself he is poaching on their preserves.’”

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All the quotes above are from the first ten pages of the book, this should tell you all you need to know. Btw, when writing this post, I found out that Wikiquote has a separate post on the book, so if you want to know a little more just follow this link.

Quotes

1. Doubt, n. The philosophical device Descartes so cleverly used to prove everything he previously believed.

L. A. Rollins, Lucifer’s Lexicon

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2. Man, n. An irrational animal whose irrationality is best demonstrated by his irrational belief in his rationality.

-ll-

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3. I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

Mark Twain

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4. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Nietzsche

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5. A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

George Iles

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6. A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde

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7. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

-ll-

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8. Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.

-ll-

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9. In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

-ll-

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10. ‘We don’t want to hear negative things about ourselves. If someone says to you “you’re a very honest person, but it takes people a while to really get to know you” then you’re almost certainly going to agree, because it’s not negative in any way. Turn that around and say the opposite – “you’re deceptive and people can read you like an open book” is awful. No one wants to hear that, it makes him or her sound shallow and evil.’

Paul Michael (‘advertising guru‘)

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The first five quotes I found here. As to Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray has been standing on my bookshelf unread for way too long, I expect to start reading it next week.