Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin.
It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
You know I am not a champion of marriage. 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.
Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of 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.
Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
‘Harry, how can you?’
‘My dear Dorian, it is quite true. I am analysing women at the present, so I ought to know. The subject is not so abstruse as I thought it was. I find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together.’
She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.
Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing….A new Hedonism—that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us.
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!
It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.
A large scale Berlin Olympics of 1936, organized by Goebbels with great generosity, became a demonstration of the strength of the German spirit, became a model of the success of this propaganda.
‘A lie told a hundred times becomes the truth,’ Goebbels deduced such a formula, broadcasting lies and launching disinformation to the masses on purpose and in huge quantities. The denigration of political opponents of the NSDAP, if there were any left in the Third Reich, and the popularization of anti-Semitism were in the focus.
I was lying on my back, without a thought, her head on my shoulder. The darkness filling the room was becoming populated. I could hear steps. The walls were disappearing. Something was towering over me, bigger and bigger, endless. I was penetrated through and through, embraced without being touched; I froze still in the darkness, feeling its acute transparency that was displacing the air. I could hear a heart very far away. I focused my whole attention, all the strength I had left, on expecting death throes. They didn’t come. I just kept shrinking, while the unseen sky, the unseen horizons, the emptiness, devoid of shapes, clouds, stars, drawing back and swelling, was making me its center.
I had switched the loudspeaker off right after takeoff, and I lacked the courage to turn it back on. I would have done virtually anything not to have to hear again that terrible voice, which carried no vestige of anything human. This much I could say — all appearances had been smashed, and from under the appearance of Harey’s face another, truer face had begun to show, compared to which the alternative of madness was truly becoming a liberation.
(Translated by Bill Johnston
Premier Digital Publishing)