The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Original 1890 Edition (A Oscar Wilde Classics)

by Oscar Wilde

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities;

He was afraid of certainty.

What was the use of knowing?

Anything would be better than this dreadful state of doubt.

There is a luxury in self-reproach.

When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

I am not sorry for anything that has happened. It has taught me to know myself better.”

You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.”

Here, one should never make one’s début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.

How extraordinarily dramatic life is!

“the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

It is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was right.

I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good resolutions—that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were.”

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.

Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”

It fills one with the terror of eternity.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.

Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.

The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

I was afraid of intruding upon a sorrow that I could not lighten.

If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.

It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives.

You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious.

Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope.

To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.

“Why have you changed your mind? You people who go in for being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only difference is that your moods are rather meaningless.

You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

Simply that you felt that you admired me too much. That is not even a compliment.” “It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession.

Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words.”

“Harry spends his days in saying what is incredible and his evenings in doing what is improbable. Just the sort of life I would like to lead.

No man comes across two ideal things. Few come across one.”

something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself—something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They would defile it and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive.

Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?

There was no reason that the future should be so full of shame.

It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it.

It was a horrible thing to have a spy in one’s house.

One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediæval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.

“I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.” “Ah, you have discovered that?”

in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place—that

The more he knew, the more he desired to know.