The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

“To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”

The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober.

“For you I would throw over anybody, Duchess,”

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine.

Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.”

“All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.”

If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation.”

I can’t afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners. They make one’s rooms look so picturesque.

I don’t think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love.

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love.

A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.

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

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grandperes ont toujours tort.”

You said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears.

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian,”

To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.

I want to make Romeo jealous. 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.

He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.”

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures.

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away.

Soul and body, body and soul—how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.

The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?

Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought?

The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also.

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others.

All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.

I love him because he is like what love himself should be.

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

He was like a common gardener walking with a rose.

When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.

And unselfish people are colourless.

As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.

You have annoyed Dorian. He is not like other men.

I want to place her on a pedestal of gold and to see the world worship the woman who is mine.

Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.

“To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self,”

I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.”

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

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.”

“I should have said that whatever they ask for they had first given to us,” murmured the lad gravely. “They create love in our natures. They have a right to demand it back.”

“You must admit, Harry, that women give to men the very gold of their lives.”

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

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.