A great novel on the themes of appearances and the morality of one's image. Wilde has an elegant style filled with insights and wisdom.

Morality isn't explicitly discussed, but the story clearly deals with how one's self-image impact their morality or even ruin their life.

Dorian Gray is the perfect embodiment of a Dionysian man who lives for pleasure. It is in some way a reflection of Wilde's own hedonistic life, but taken to the extreme.

My Notes

Wilde has both that poetic and profound writing that reveal a lot about our nature.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.

I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions—that they are always made too late.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

I don't desire to change anything in England except the weather.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

On Art

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.

All art is quite useless.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

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

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 himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

On Love

My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.

On Appearances

Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me.

The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

On Morality

Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.

Dorian locked the door and put the key in his pocket. He felt safe now. No one would ever look upon the horrible thing. No eye but his would ever see his shame.

For every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness.

The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience.

Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.