Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

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

But I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

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

"An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

We have lost the abstract sens...

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. 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.

"Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having."

When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you,

For there is such a little time that your youth will last--such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish.

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

"I can sympathize with everything except suffering,"

"I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the better."

"To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies."

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

"Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.

I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

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

I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.

"I am going," he said at last in his calm clear voice. "I don't wish to be unkind, but I can't see you again. You have disappointed me."

But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?

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.

But it is all right now. I am not sorry for anything that has happened. It has taught me to know myself better."

I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous."

I was afraid of intruding upon a sorrow that I could not lighten.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.

He waited for people to come to him. But he always made an exception in favour of Dorian Gray. There was something about Dorian that charmed everybody. It was a pleasure even to see him.

The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.

Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be.

Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

"I don't wish to know anything about them. I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty."

Did I teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery?

My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite."

Can't you see what I am going through? My God! don't tell me that you are bad, and corrupt, and shameful."

Dorian Gray turned slowly around and looked at him with tear-dimmed eyes. "It is too late, Basil," he faltered.

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

Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.

The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to mad delightful follies. There was romance in every place.

To him, as to many others, Dorian Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life.

"I have no desire to help you. You forget that. I am simply indifferent to the whole thing.

"The dead linger sometimes.

"The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes," said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.

"I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting. Besides, the stuff is better."

Make your peace with God, for to-night you are going to die."

for the face of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom of boyhood, all the unstained purity of youth.

"Let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your own hands."

They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. It's nigh on eighteen years since I met him. He hasn't changed much since then. I have, though,"