^интересно.

Аз все още се опитвам да се организирам, но споделям някакви впечатления (кратки) от последната книга, която прочетох, а именно The Picture of Dorian Grey. Не знам дали си въобразявам, но си мисля, че авторът умело е побрал целия цинизъм на света в образа на Lord Henry, като той представляваше една чудна сплав от философия и съвети. Докато четях имах чувството, че Oscar Wilde е създал този герой някак иронично. Бр, не мога да напиша това, което усещам. Във всеки случай, Дориан ми беше безкрайно скучен. Лорд Хенри ми беше най-интересен.

Споделям следните цитати, не защото ми харесват, а защото ме накараха да се замисля.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of vic- tory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and with- out disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands.

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,” cried Lord Henry.

“You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every 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.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

“Have you really a very bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as Basil says?”
“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.”
“Why?”
“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. 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 hun- gry 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.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

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. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.

 Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.

The real draw- back to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unself- ish people are colourless. They lack individuality.