The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”

‘A dream of form in days of thought’—

But I don’t want money. It is only people who pay their bills who want that, Uncle George, and I never pay mine. Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly upon it.

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence.

Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.”

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. When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.

There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases,

Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not “Forgive us our sins” but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the prayer of man to a most just God.