The Picture of Dorian Gray Quotes

"Dorian, this is horrible! Something has changed you completely. You look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come down to my studio to sit for his picture. But you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. You were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. Now, I don’t know what has come over you. You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry’s influence. I see that."
The lad flushed up and, going to the window, looked out for a few moments on the green, flickering, sun-lashed garden. "I owe a great deal to Harry, Basil," he said at last, "more than I owe to you. You only taught me to be vain."
"Well, I am punished for that, Dorian – or shall be some day."

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 9. Basil notices that Dorian has changed from the simple and unspoiled young man who used to come to sit in his studio for his picture. He blames Dorian’s transition to someone who speaks without heart or pity on the bad influence of Lord Henry. Dorian replies that Basil has taught him to be vain. To which Basil ominously says that he will be punished for that some day. This foreshadows that Dorian will later kill his friend when a horrified Basil sees in the portrait the depravity of soul that has overtaken the once innocent and beautiful Dorian.

As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 9. Dorian is a fast learner under the mentorship of Lord Henry. He is even coming up with witty epigrams to rival his mentor. This one rather desparagingly about actors, who practice the performing art of acting, leading commonplace tedious lives. Although he does qualify this by saying how different Sibyl was and that "she lived her finest tragedy."

To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life. I know you are surprised at my talking to you like this. You have not realized how I have developed. I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now. I have new passions, new thoughts, new ideas. I am different, but you must not like me less. I am changed, but you must always be my friend. Of course, I am very fond of Harry. But I know that you are better than he is. You are not stronger – you are too much afraid of life – but you are better. And how happy we used to be together! Don’t leave me, Basil, and don’t quarrel with me. I am what I am. There is nothing more to be said.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 9. Dorian wishes to be the spectator of his own life and review his experiences and impressions like you assess a work of art. He admits to Basil that he is a changed man. But is it for the better? We think not. He speaks of indulging his "new passions, new thoughts, new ideas" brought about under the influence of self-proclaimed hedonist and unremitting pleasure seeker Lord Henry. In the new Dorian there are few signs of guilt or self-awareness or a conscience at work. He will be a spectator of his own sins as he watches them manifest themselves in the changing face of Basil’s portrait of him. Appealing to Basil to always remain his friend, he compares him with Lord Henry and tells him that he is too afraid of life. This is rather ironic, as Dorian will kill his friend Basil with a knife of Chapter 20.

One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 9. Basil tells Dorian that when working on his painting he tried to portray Dorian in various historical settings, such as Paris and Adonis. But then one "fatal day" he decided to paint Dorian as he appeared in his own dress in the present day. The use of the word "fatal" is foreshadowing of the deaths to come, caused by Basil’s creation of the portrait and the narcassism it represents in Dorian – in Chapter 1 when Lord Henry first sees the painting he exclaims: "Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus."

Harry spends his days in saying what is incredible and his evenings in doing what is improbable. Just the sort of life I would like to lead. But still I don’t think I would go to Harry if I were in trouble. I would sooner go to you, Basil.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 9. Dorian loves Lord Henry’s verbal fluency and philosophizing, but Basil is his special friend. Or so he claims. The irony in Dorian’s statement that he would turn to Basil in times of trouble will become very apparent as the novel progresses. For he grows to hate Basil and extinguishes the life of his friend.

Dorian Gray drew a long breath. The colour came back to his cheeks, and a smile played about his lips. The peril was over. He was safe for the time. Yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for the painter who had just made this strange confession to him, and wondered if he himself would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend. Lord Henry had the charm of being very dangerous. But that was all. He was too clever and too cynical to be really fond of. Would there ever be some one who would fill him with a strange idolatry? Was that one of the things that life had in store?

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 9. When Basil confesses the reason that he refused to exhibit Dorian’s picture – he worshipped the beautiful young man – Dorian is at once intrigued and filled with pity for his friend. He labels Basil’s infatuation with him a "strange idolatry" and wonders if he would ever feel the same way towards a friend. Lord Henry is immediately ruled out because Dorian thinks that he is too clever and cynical and clever to be really fond of.

I can’t explain it to you, Basil, but I must never sit to you again. There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 9. Dorian won’t let Basil see the portrait and tells him he won’t sit to him again. After Sibyl’s death, when a blemish appears on the painting to mark Dorian’s sin of cruelty to her, he decides to hide the picture from public view. There is a noticeable change in Dorian’s mood here as he begins to consider his own mortality and he is frightened by it. He believes that the changed painting reflects his flawed soul – the Gothic magical portrait has developed a life of its own!

How much that strange confession explained to him! The painter’s absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his curious reticences – he understood them all now, and he felt sorry. There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 9. After Basil’s "strange confession" of love for him, it is clear that Dorian doesn’t not have the same romantic feelings for Basil. When he speaks of it being tragic for romance to intrude on friendship, this could be seen to be foreshadowing of how Basil will meet a tragic end at the hands of the man who idolizes.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would always be alive.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. Dorian uses the metaphor of worms on a corpse to describe how his sins would mar the beauty of his portrait painted by Basil and reflect the corruption of his soul. There is strong Gothic symbolism in the description of the "alive" portrait of his soul. He arranges for the picture with its "face on the canvas viler than before" to be covered over, taken to an attic room and hidden from view "from prying eyes."

The love that he bore him – for it was really love – had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born of the senses, and that dies when the senses tire. It was such love as Michelangelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. Yes, Basil could have saved him. But it was too late now…There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. Dorian speaks about Basil’s love for him in a passage that references its homoerotic nature and the "love that dare not speak its name." Dorian admits that his gentle and caring friend Basil could have saved him from Lord Henry’s influence and from the sins he will surely commit. But now it is too late, he believes, he is well and truly on the path to evil. Dorian’s admission is an acknowledgement that Lord Henry’s influence has triumphed and evil has won.

Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked round. He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here the fatal portrait was to be hidden away. How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store for him!

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. Dorian has flashbacks to the innocence of his childhood when he enters the attic schoolroom. It is here that he locks away the portrait. The room was first used as a playroom when he was a child and then as a study when he grew older. He is somewhat disturbed that the rotting portrait is to be stored here among his childhood memories, but he decides that there is no other place in the house so secure from "prying eyes."

Beneath its purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it. He himself would not see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept his youth – that was enough. And, besides, might not his nature grow finer, after all? There was no reason that the future should be so full of shame. Some love might come across his life, and purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh – those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. Concealed by its purple cover in the locked attic, Dorian knows that his portrait will continue to corrupt and show the erosion of his soul. Why should he watch it, he asks himself? He keeps the full bloom of his youth and that is enough for him. He holds out hope that some day love might enter his life to purge and protect him from the future sins stirring up inside him. But at this point redemption seems a forelorn hope for Dorian, who confesses his that he is attracted by the "charm" of this life of sin.

Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow’s feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. The picture had to be concealed. There was no help for it.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. While Dorian may escape the clutches of the law and society for his crimes and sins, he knows that there is no hiding place from the portrait for his festering soul. He will appear eternally young, but every wrongdoing will be etched on the evil face of the aging, decaying portrait. The painted Dorian will grow hideous and wrinkled and twisted, a symbol of his mortality, and must be hidden.

His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. Dorian takes up the unnamed novel that Lord Henry gave him to read. The book’s title is never given but it is generally thought to be Joris-Karl Huysman’s nineteenth-century novel À Rebours (translated as "Against Nature" or "Against the Grain"). Dorian becomes completely absorbed in the book and it will have a huge influence on him for years to come.

It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. Dorian is reading the decadent yellow book given to him by Lord Henry. Its pages introduce Dorian to the sins of the world and reveal things he never before dreamed of.

It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own…loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men unwisely have called virtue as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. Dorian is fascinated by the main character in the yellow book. He is impressed by his courage in trying to live all the passions and modes of thought of other centuries, including the virtues and sins.

One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and the creeping shadows.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 10. Dorian is greatly taken with a novel about a young Parisian man who indulges himself in all kinds of passions. The lines between virtue and sin are blurred in the poisonous yellow book, which was given to him as a gift by Lord Henry. Wilde uses metaphorical language to compare the book to a drug and to highlight the influence it and Lord Henry have on the young man. The quote continues with the use of musical metaphor, suggesting that the book is having its desired effect of corrupting Dorian.

He procured from Paris no less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. The yellow book becomes like sacred scripture to Dorian, who buys multiple copies of it and has them found in various colors to suit his different moods. The book’s profound corrupting influence is evident in Dorian’s admission that he has almost entirely lost control of his nature.

In one point he was more fortunate than the novel’s fantastic hero. He never knew – never, indeed, had any cause to know – that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still water which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had once, apparently, been so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy – and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place – that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its really tragic, if somewhat overemphasized, account of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world, he had most dearly valued.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. Dorian’s good fortune in staying young and beautiful is contrasted with the fate of the decadent young Parisian man in the yellow book. The Frenchman suffers the sudden loss of his remarkable beauty, bringing him sorrow and despair. The narcissistic Dorian admits to "an almost cruel joy" in reading the latter part of the book about the decay of the hero’s youthful looks. Unlike him, Dorian knows no dread of mirrors or polished surfaces. The next line after this passage tells us: "The wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward, and many others besides him, seemed never to leave him."

He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room. There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. As the years pass Dorian is the target of "strange rumours about his mode of life" and "the most evil things" being said against him. But his appearance of eternal youth protects him from the scandalous talk, because when people see him they cannot believe he would do anything dishonourable. People wonder how he could have escaped the sordidness and sensuality of his age – this is somewhat ironic because Dorian doesn’t escape it, it’s just that his corruption doesn’t show in his face, but in the portrait in his attic!

He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy, sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. Often Dorian would visit his portrait in the locked attic, stand with a mirror in his hand and look at the evil and aging face in the painting, and then at the beautiful young face smiling back at him from the mirror. His vanity in his ageless beauty continues to grow, and he takes delight in watching his portrait become old instead of him and reflect his sins and decaying soul.

He would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. His little dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. The story leaps forward in time, detailing the years Dorian spends emulating the adventures of the hero of the yellow book Lord Henry gave him. Dorian’s lifestyle goes full hedonism – a life dedicated to pleasure: dinner parties, musical gatherings, a beautiful house full of gold and silver, embroidered cloths and exotic flowers, showing his taste for the decorative arts. His mentor Lord Henry helped with the arranging of the dinners.

Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to re-create life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. Dorian has fallen completely under the spell of Lord Henry’s hedonism. He wants to live a hedonistic lifestyle and embrace the worship of the senses, as taught to him by the silver-tongued Henry. Every kind of "passionate experience" is now to be sought out by Dorian in a rejection of the morality of the day. Henry’s "new Hedonism" will recreate life and save it from the harsh puritanism that is on the rise, Dorian believes.

On his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.

– Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 11. For weeks Dorian would not go near the portrait in the locked attic room. Then occasionally after leaving the house to visit some "dreadful places," he would sit and look at the picture with a mixture of loathing and pleasure. Fascinated, he would smile at how the changing portrait had to bear the shame of his sins instead of him.
Close