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. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

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

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away.

there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

“but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”

Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.

When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them.

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us.

When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to br...

I like to find out people for myself.

“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one,”

none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.

There is nothing that Art cannot express,

The harmony of soul and body — how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two,

But the world might guess it; and I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.

“I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won’t argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

The thoroughly well-informed man — that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing.

One’s own soul, and the passions of one’s friends — those were the fascinating things in life.

The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.

They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.

Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar.

Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...

The world belongs to you for a season...

I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last — such a little time.

“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.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

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.”

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

Don’t be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you. This is merely the beginning.”

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

And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.

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.”

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.

I want to be good. I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”

But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.

but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin,

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

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”

“You told me you had destroyed it.” “I was wrong. It has destroyed me.”

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them; strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions,

“That is your error, Harry, believe me. You value beauty far too much.”