“You will always be fond of me. I
represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
“Those who find ugly meanings in
beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who
find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there
is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is
no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly
written. That is all.”
“I don't want to be at the mercy of
my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
“There is only one thing in the
world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
“Humanity takes itself too
seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to
laugh, History would have been different.”
“Nowadays most people die of a sort
of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things
one never regrets are one's mistakes.”
“Words! Mere words! How terrible
they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And
yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a
plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as
that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
“Laughter is not at all a bad
beginning for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.”
“Because 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 else's
music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is
self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is
here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest
of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are
charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls
starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never
really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror
of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern
us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and
completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought,
reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse
of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the
Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.
But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the
savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are
punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in
the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for
action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of
a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation
is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the
things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have
made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the
world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the
great sins of the world take place also.”
“Live! Live the wonderful life that
is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new
sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
From A Picture Of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
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