This is my 2nd installment capturing the epigrams and thought-provoking passages from Lord Henry and Basil Hallward from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Read on and have a great delicious treat. I had this categorized for two characters - Lord Henry and Basil Hallward.
CHAPTER 1
Lord Henry's:
"for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about"
"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"
"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"
"He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence"
"The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties."
"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose i know"
"Ï want you to explain to me why you won't exhibit Dorian Gray's picture. I want the real reason."
"And as for believing things, i can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible"
"Consience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Consience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."
"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one"
"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects"
"A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.
"The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
"The probabilities are that the more insincere the main idea is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices."
"I like persons better thanks principles, and i like persons with no principles better thanks anything else in the worlds"
"It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue"
"It is a sad thing to think of, but Genius lasts longer thanks Beauty"
"The worst of having a romance of any kind is that, it leaves one so unromantic"
"Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies"
Basil Hallward's:
"there is fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings"
"It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play."
"Ïf they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquite."
"If I like people immensely, i never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy"
"Secrecy... It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us."
"The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it"
"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion."
"It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colured canvas, reveals himself."
"The reason i will not exhibit this picture is that i am afraid that i have shown in it the secret of my own soul"
"Ï have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put on his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day"
If you've enjoyed this from Chapter 1, go ahead and continue the epigrams from my first installment by clicking this link.
and here's the part 2
Until next time.
ˆbillymacdeus
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