The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

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

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

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.

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.

“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. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.

“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

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

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

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

When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.”

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.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.