Oscar Wilde: The Truly Complete Collection

by Oscar Wilde

I have put too much of myself into it.”

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.

You know how I love secrecy. It is the only thing that can make modern life wonderful or mysterious to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

I can believe anything, provided that it is incredible.”

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

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

we can’t stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty.

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

Don’t spoil him for me. Don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad.

“There is no such thing as a good influence,

“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. 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.

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,—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediævalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal,—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. 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.

“No, you don’t feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so?

“Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which really to live. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly. “Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t

squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar, which are the aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.

The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we did not dare to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”

“How sad it is!” murmured Dorian Gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June…. If it was only the other way! If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this—for this—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!”

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it. Oh, if it was only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day,—mock me horribly!”

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot:

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.”

women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. They represent the triumph of matter over mind,

“Don’t run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary charm in them, sometimes.”

“It is only the sacred things that are worth touching,

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls romance.

How different he was now from the shy, frightened boy he had met in Basil Hallward’s studio! His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his Soul,

and Desire had come to meet it on the way.

“He gives you good advice, I suppose. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.”

“Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry,” said Hallward, smiling. “Except in America.

Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.”

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

The world would have worshipped you, and you would have belonged to me.