Цитаты из книги The Picture of Dorian Gray

8 июля 2010 г.

"Мужчины женятся от усталости, женщины выходят из любопытства"

26 декабря 2009 г.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

22 июля 2009 г.

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

26 декабря 01:43

Still, we have done great things."
"Great things have been thrust on us, Gladys."
"We have carried their burden."
"Only as far as the Stock Exchange."
She shook her head.
"I believe in the race,"
she cried.
"It represents the survival of the pushing."
"It has development."
"Decay fascinates me more."
"What of art?"
she asked.
"It is a malady."
"Love?"
"An illusion."
"Religion?"
"The fashionable substitute for belief."
"You are a sceptic."
"Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith."

8 июля 2010 г.

"Тем, кто верен в любви, доступна лишь ее банальная сущность. Трагедию же любви познают лишь те, кто изменяет"

26 декабря 2009 г.

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

26 декабря 2009 г.

When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives absolution.

26 декабря 2009 г.

Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

26 декабря 2009 г.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. 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.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

26 декабря 01:25

I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you.

10 октября 17:43

"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."

10 октября 17:33

"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. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful."

28 сентября 22:15

The aim of life is self-development.

People know price of everything and value of nothing.

12 июля 2011 г.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

8 июля 2010 г.

"Жизнь, подобно поэзии, или скульптуре, или живописи также создает свои шедевры"

8 июля 2010 г.

Женщина - это воплощение торжествующей над духом материи, мужчина же олицетворяет собой торжество мысли над моралью"

21 декабря 2009 г.

The only way to get rid of temtation is to yield to it.

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth.

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

The one charm about the past is that it is the past.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others.

If a man is a gentelman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentelman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

8 апреля 2009 г.

"... murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner".

"Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams".

"... there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about , and that is not being talked about".