Dorian Gray Quotes

“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The ugly and 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. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“because to influence a person is to give one's own soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You look ill,” Matthew observed. “Is it my dancing? Is it me personally?”
“Perhaps I’m nervous,” she said. “Lucie did say you didn’t like many people.”
Matthew gave a sharp, startled laugh, before schooling his face back into a look of lazy amusement. “Did she? Lucie’s a chatterbox.”
“But not a liar,” she said.
“Well, fear not. I do not dislike you. I hardly know you,” said Matthew. “I do know your brother. He made my life miserable at school, and Christopher’s, and James’s.”
“Alastair and I are very different,” Cordelia said. She didn’t want to say more than that. It felt disloyal to Alastair. “I like Oscar Wilde, for instance, and he does not.”
The corner of Matthew’s mouth curled up. “I see you go directly for the soft underbelly, Cordelia Carstairs. Have you really read Oscar’s work?”
“Just Dorian Gray,” Cordelia confessed. “It gave me nightmares.”
“I should like to have a portrait in the attic,” Matthew mused, “that would show all my sins, while I stayed young and beautiful. And not only for sinning purposes—imagine being able to try out new fashions on it. I could paint the portrait’s hair blue and see how it looks.”
“You don’t need a portrait. You are young and beautiful,” Cordelia pointed out.
“Men are not beautiful. Men are handsome,” objected Matthew.
“Thomas is handsome. You are beautiful,” said Cordelia, feeling the imp of the perverse stealing over her. Matthew was looking stubborn. “James is beautiful too,” she added.
“He was a very unprepossessing child,” said Matthew. “Scowly, and he hadn’t grown into his nose.”
“He’s grown into everything now,” Cordelia said.
Matthew laughed, again as if he was surprised to be doing it. “That was a very shocking observation, Cordelia Carstairs. I am shocked.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Gold

“You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.”
― Oscar Wilde

“I have been right, Basil, haven’t I, to take my love out of poetry, and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Come, I tell you. You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look on it face to face!”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The curves of your lips rewrite history”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“BEATRICE: Do you truly not know who he was? Mr. Dorian Gray, the lover of Mr. Oscar Wilde, who was sent to Reading Gaol for—well, for holding opinions that society does not approve of! For believing in beauty, and art, and love. What guilt and remorse he must feel, for causing the downfall of the greatest playwright of the age! It was Mr. Gray’s dissolute parties, the antics of his hedonistic friends, that exposed Mr. Wilde to scandal and opprobrium. No wonder he has fallen prey to the narcotic.

MARY: Or he could just like opium. He didn’t seem particularly remorseful, Bea.

JUSTINE: Mr. Gray is not what society deems him to be. He has been greatly misunderstood. He assures me that he had no intention of harming Mr. Wilde.

MARY: He would say that.

CATHERINE: Can we not discuss the Wilde scandal in the middle of my book? You’re going to get it banned in Boston, and such other puritanical places.”
― Theodora Goss, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl

“Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It scares the living daylights out of everybody. Present company excepted, I’m sure.” “I don’t really do living or daylight,” Dorian said. “I’m a Gothic masterpiece.”
― H.G. Parry, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of
beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism
is a mode of autobiography.
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.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

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

The nineteenth century dislike of
Realism is the rage of Caliban
seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of
Romanticism is the rage of Caliban
not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the
subject-matter of the artist, but the morality
of art consists in the perfect use of an im-
perfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even
things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An
ethical sympathy in an artist is an un-
pardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist
can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist
instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials
for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all
the arts is the art of the musician. From the
point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the
Type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at
their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at
their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really
Mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art
shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord
with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful
thing as long as he does not admire it. The
only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.”
― Oscar Wilde., The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Oh! In what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Le donne ci ispirano il desiderio di far dei capolavori e ci impediscono sempre di eseguirli”
― Oscar Wilde, Il ritratto di Dorian Gray

“¡Cielo santo! ¡Qué loco estaba al quererte! ¡Qué imbécil he sido! Ya no significas nada para mí. Nunca volveré a verte. Nunca pensaré en ti. Nunca mencionaré tu nombre. No te das cuenta de lo que representabas para mí. Pensarlo me resulta intolerable. ¡Quisiera no haberte visto nunca! Has destruido la poesía de mi vida.”
― Oscar Wilde, El retrato de Dorian Grey

“A coisa mais banal se torna deliciosa se a escondermos”
― Oscar Wilde

“For God's sake don't talk to me,' cried Dorian, stamping his foot on the ground. 'What do you want? Money. Here it is. Don't ever talk to me again,”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Ruhun acısını ancak duyular alır, nasıl ki duyuların acısını alabilecek tek şey de ruhtur.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It will always worship you. You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.”
― Oscar Wilde

“There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamored of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those who minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black, fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of the birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleeper, and yet must needs call forth Sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin, dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Düşes, “Ya sanata ne diyorsun?” diye sordu.
“Bir illettir.”
“Aşk?”
“Yanılsama.”
“Din?”
“İnancın yerini tutan günün modası.”
"Sen kuşkucusun.”
“Hiç de değil. Kuşkuculuk imanın başlangıcıdır.”
“Ya nesin sen öyleyse?”
“Tanımlamak kısıtlamaktır.”
“Bir ipucu ver bana.”
“İp dediğin kopar. Labirentte kaybolabilirsin.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Il passato non ha che un unico fascino: quello di essere passato.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Allorché venne in contatto colla vita la distrusse e questa distrusse lei; e così è scomparsa”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“В молодости Панхарий был красивым мужиком, но к старости пороки развалили его рожу на куски”
― Ivanov Aleksei Viktorovich