The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

"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.

"Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one,"

"Because I have put into it all the extraordinary romance of which, of course, I have never dared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He will never know anything about it. But the world might guess it; and I will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry, – too much of myself!"

Then I feel, Harry, that 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."

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

"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. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self.

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

"Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair, Dorian," he said, after a few puffs. "Why, Harry?" "Because they are so sentimental." "But I like sentimental people." "Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."

"Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes."

"I'll back English women against the world, Harry,"

"Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?" inquired the Duchess. "They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.

Lord Henry looked over at Mr. Erskine. "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."

The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.

"To be good is to be in harmony with one's self,"

"Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege