The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say."

selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him.

What I want is

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic."

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

"I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the better."

"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."

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.

"I quite forget what I said," smiled Lord Henry. "Was it all very bad?"

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

"Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

you have often told me that it is personalities, not principles, that move the age."

"People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all

creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look.

Human life--that

appeared to him the one thing worth investigating.

at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord--there was a delight in that!

The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also.

As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If

harmony with one's self,"

"Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

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

The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange.

were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on

the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been fulfilled? Such things were impossible.

She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age.

It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?

the visible emblem of conscience.

we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities; and

He scanned it curiously, wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a man's life.

be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all.

was trying to gather up the scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern; to find his way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.

"my letter--don't be frightened--was to tell you that Sibyl Vane is dead."

Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been addressed to a dead girl.

there is a fatality about good resolutions--that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were."

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

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.

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

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

He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.

He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its

highest realization.