There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Genuine
Yes. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Preface.
Found word for word by program in the full text.
- Work
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
- Where
- Preface
- Found at
- Paragraph 9 of the text
Researched by AI; checked by program against the full text on 31 October 2026. Editorial review: pending. How we check
On the page
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. […]
The scene
In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde sets out a series of aesthetic propositions about artists, critics and readers. This one separates literary quality from moral classification; nearby he makes vice and virtue materials for art, rather than standards by which to judge its execution.
What it means
A book should be judged as a work of art, by how well it is written, not classified as morally good or bad.
Often misread
This is an aesthetic claim, not an assertion that readers and characters cannot act immorally or that books cannot influence them. It belongs to Wilde’s signed preface, not to Lord Henry’s dialogue.
Topics
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- the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; Martin Luther King Jr.
- Forty hour work weeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes—train and sprint, then rest and reassess. Naval Ravikant
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