The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.”

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.

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

Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.

I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said.

Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer’s day.”

worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

And beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Really?

“Why can’t these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.”

Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.”

I always hear Harry’s views from his friends. It is the only way I get to know of them.

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.

Ummm …okay…

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists.

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

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

if he ever does you any wrong, I shall kill him.”

I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.

Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.”

“but I am always ready for a new emotion. I am afraid, however, that, for me at any rate, there is no such thing.

She makes them as responsive as a violin.

she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her. It was not nervousness. Indeed, so far from being nervous, she was absolutely self-contained. It was simply bad art.

“They are both simply forms of imitation,”

Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. You have made me see that.”

You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity.

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic.

coldness of the moon had entered into them.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. 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 ...

How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually,