The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.

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

An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

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.

“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.”

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 sense of beauty.

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

what the gods give they quickly take away.

“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 lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”

“American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past,”