The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself, he is poaching on their preserves.

there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.

It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

And beauty is a form of genius--is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

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

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

"How dreadful!" cried Lord Henry. "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect."

"It is the problem of slavery, and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves."

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

"People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."

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, one 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!

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives."

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.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.