“Human life—that appeared to him
the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any
value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and
pleasure, once could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, nor keep the
sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid
with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that
to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so
strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their
nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole
world became to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the
emotional coloured life of the intellect—to observe where they met, and where
they separated, at what point the were in unison, and at what point they were
at discord—there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One
could never pay too high a price for any sensation.”
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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