The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

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

Tell me more about Mr. Dorian Gray. How often do you see him?” “Every day. I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t see him every day. He is absolutely necessary to me.” “How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything but your art.” “He is all my art to me now,” said the painter gravely.

“American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past,”

There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that—perhaps

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.”

But you should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love.

I love her, and I must make her love me. You, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! 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.