Quotes about Perception

Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.

Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.

And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You lost life's secret.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks.

MRS ALLONBY I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk. HESTER I think the stupid people talk a great deal. MRS ALLONBY Ah, I never listen!

The supreme vice is shallowness.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

To look wise is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.