The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

I knew that if I spoke to Dorian I would become absolutely devoted to him, and that I ought not to speak to him.

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”

“He is all my art to me now.

I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.”

It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to overeducate ourselves.

No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him. He was made to be worshipped.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

The only difference between a caprice, and a life-long passion, is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”

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

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.

I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad.

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

There is a luxury in self-reproach. 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.

If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it.

There was something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance, something infinitely tragic in a romance that was at once so passionate and so sterile.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.

“I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

The young man was leaning against the mantel-shelf, watching him with that strange expression that is on the faces of those who are absorbed in a play, when a great artist is acting. There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator,

“You told me you had destroyed it.” “I was wrong. It has destroyed me.”

But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

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

“My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralise. You will soon be going about warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired.

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