Cassandra 's Key Ideas from The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. That is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril

All art is quite useless

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

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know

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

I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves

The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it

There is not doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies

Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul

Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us

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

And beauty is a form of genius — is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation