The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 Uncensored Edition + The Expanded and Revised 1891 Edition)

by Oscar Wilde

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides

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

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly, – that is what each of us is here for.

The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion, – these are the two things that govern us.

"I believe that if one man were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."

"Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer."

She was always in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions.

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

"My dear boy, people who only love once in their lives are really shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or the lack of imagination. Faithlessness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the intellectual life, – simply a confession of failure.

Soul and body, body and soul – how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name we gave to our mistakes.

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.

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than ourselves, and that we are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.