The Picture of Dorian Gray (Penguin Clothbound Classics)

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I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”

what brings you out so early? I thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible till five." --A new personal favorite. That I follow very seriously. Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?" Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place."

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I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them and to dominate them.”

I re-read this for university and loved it even more the second time round... Lord Henry is a paradigmatic sophist and his epigrams are delightful (partly because it's easy to forget that he is more rhetoric than truth). The connection between youthful appearance and character is also so fascinating, especially since Wilde is writing at the end of the century where physiognomy is an outdated science. What does it mean to be young? And can innocence ever be restored? 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.”The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.

Lord Henry was the man who opens Dorian's eyes to the fact that the only thing he has to his advantage is the beauty of his youth, that he should enjoy life while he is young enough to experience it fully. He states that experience is not a teacher, and that men don't learn from the mistakes they make as they live. Your experiences don't count for anything. It seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy for Dorian Gray. Instead of realizing how his selfish, shallow actions could hurt and destroy others, he never did do that. He merely went from one fixation to the other, marking the effects on the portrait that he guarded jealously. In the end, there was no value to what he experienced. He was just wasting time (in my opinion). Oscar Wilde drags us into the dark depths of the human soul, and once you get there you don’t want to return to the surface anymore. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.” Anyway, I said that to say this: this book was waaaay more interesting than I thought it was going to be when I first decided to read it. There is much to take away from this book. Themes exploring shallowness, selfishness, superficiality, hedonism, morality, and flaws of life and being human. What is beauty? I tend to think it's a double-edged sword. We are all attracted to things that are beautiful, that have a physical appeal. But, should we be content with merely a comely appearance, while the inside is rotted? Dorian Gray was a man of such unearthly beauty that people could not believe he was capable of the debauchery he had committed. Those who didn't heed the warnings given to them, came to rue it. Basil, who painted the young Dorian's fateful picture, couldn't accept that Dorian had become such a horrible person. What a sad fate that was for Basil.