Excerpts from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

In short, most exerpts from this book is Lord Henry rationalizing and romanticizing being an asshole.

"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; ..."

"... that I have given away my whoel soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm its vanity, an ornament for a summer's day."

"... there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing."

"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 hte 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 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 mornstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful."

"He has certainly not been paying me compliments. Perhaps that is the reason that I don't believe anything he has told me."

"... that is the great secrets of life - to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul."

"... but we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes lsuggish. Out limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not hte courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!"

"I can sympathise with everything, except suffering. I cannot sympathise with that, it is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better."

"But as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure of sympathy, I would suggest that we should appeal to Science to put us straight. The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that it is not emotional."

"... the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What tehy call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day."

"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 htey are. A great poet, a areally great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. "

"The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos."

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."

"Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possessses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us."

"What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want ot be at the mercy of my emotions. I want ot use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."

"... There were opium dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new."