The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde
Available free for Kindle at Amazon.

Thought provoking Lines:

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.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

"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 coloured canvas, reveals himself.

"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one," said the young lord, plucking another daisy.

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."

Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals."

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."