The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live--undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands.

You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose."

"every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul."

I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies."

"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view."

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself,

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

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

"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."

"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them,

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

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

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

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

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

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

It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.

"What of art?" she asked. "It is a malady." "Love?" "An illusion." "Religion?" "The fashionable substitute for belief." "You are a sceptic." "Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith." "What are you?" "To define is to limit."

"Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity."

Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.

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

I suppose he bored you. If so, he never forgave you. It's a habit bores have.

"Ah! then it must be an illusion. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.

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

Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a most just God.