The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

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

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

“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.

“Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having.”

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

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

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

“To see him is to worship him; to know him is to trust him.”

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

The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.

As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul.

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

Of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice, and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer to the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about him.

Society—civilized society, at least—is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating.

There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes.

Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality.

Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”