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

by Oscar Wilde

He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high indifference of joy.

“The only horrible thing in the world is ennui,

As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

I have no terror of death. It is the coming of death that terrifies me.

“How fond women are of doing dangerous things!”

A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.”

I like the duchess very much, but I don’t love her.” “And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you are excellently matched.”

“The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty,”

“You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram.” “The world goes to the altar of its own accord,” was the answer.

“I wish I could love,” cried Dorian Gray with a deep note of pathos in his voice. “But I seem to have lost the p...

Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know some one who had committed a real murder.”

“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”

“All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys.” “What is that?” “Disillusion.”

“Has he never been jealous?” “I wish he had been.”

“anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.

Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.”

It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”

Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it.”

Of course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”

He was not clever enough to have enemies.

He had no curiosity. It was his chief defect.”

All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.”

anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,”

One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

If so, he never forgave you. It’s a habit bores have.

“If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart,”

what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose—how does the quotation run?—his own soul’?”

The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect.

The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

It’s absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself.

As for the aged, I always contradict the aged. I do...

If you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in 1820, when people wore high stocks, believed...

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.

Life has been your art.

Your days are your sonnets.”

“My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. You will soon be going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired. You are much too delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use. You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be.

Art has no influence upon action.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the ...

He was tired of hearing his own name now. Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was.

She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.

Was it really true that one could never change?

Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it.

There was purification in punishment.

Not “Forgive us our sins” but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the prayer o...

It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain.

His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery.

It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him.

He would never again tempt innocence.