The Picture of Dorian Gray

la consolation des arts?

As he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from

A verdict of death by misadventure was returned.

through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself,

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never bee

there is a fatality about good resolutions--that they are always made too late.