About book The Picture Of Dorian Gray And Other Works (Halcyon Classics) (2000)
I love a book that has reason to give me pause, and this book was exactly that. Some quotables:1. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction...it is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in the 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.2. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.3. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.4. You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.5. Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.6. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul7. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible...8. She behaves as if she were beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm. 9. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.10. To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies.11. The only thing one never regrets are one's mistakes12. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity. 13. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize. 14. That book of cowardice whose author apes the name common sense. 15. Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. 16. To be good is to be in harmony with one's self.17. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.18. That awful memory of a woman! What a fearful thing it is!19. 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.20. I like men who have a future and women who have a past.21. She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.22. Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular, one must be a mediocrity. 23. We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all. I read this many years ago, and re-reading it is a revelation. Some books are meant for greater age and experience to be truly understood and this is one. I think you need to be 30+ to understand Wilde, although he entertains at any age.One of my favorites so far is The Portrait of Mr. W.H., for its apt description of the passage of intellectual obsessions, and for this quote: "Martyrdom was to me merely a tragic form of scepticism, an attempt to realise by fire, what one had failed to do by faith. No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their heart tells them is not true. "
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The plot is rather bizarre, but the dialogue is fabulous. Lots of great lines in this book.
—kylie
