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

by Oscar Wilde

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow....

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.”

Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art, you are nothing.

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.

And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.

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

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.