The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

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

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

All art is quite useless.

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

The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

“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.”

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.

Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not.

“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 someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realise 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. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. 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. And yet—”

The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.

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, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

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

youth is the one thing worth having.”

“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 for ever. 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.”

If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.”

can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that it is not emotional.”

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.”

“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

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

Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history.

To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.

inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas.

When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.”

You don’t, but it is nice of you to pretend that you do. Well, she made it out of nothing. All good hats are made out of nothing.”

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