The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray Quotes

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view."
"Why?"
"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. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty hat one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. 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. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet, I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself”
― Oscar Wilde , The Picture of Dorian Gray (Collector's Edition): Including the Uncensored 13 Chapter Version & The Revised 20 Chapter Version

“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 are hope.”
― Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

“All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey

“The one charm of the past is that it is the past.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“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. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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;”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Uncensored 13 Chapter Version + The Revised 20 Chapter Version

“One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“And so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“What fire does not destroy, it hardens.”
― Oscar Wilde Centre, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads.”
“All right, Uncle George, I’ll tell her, but it won’t have any effect. Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Uncensored 13 Chapter Version + The Revised 20 Chapter Version

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating — people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Original 1890 'Uncensored' Edition & The Revised 1891 Edition

“You are a wonderful creature. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their characters, and my enemies for their brains.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person that makes life absolutely lovely to me, and that gives to my art whatever wonder or charm it possesses. Mind, Harry, I trust you.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day you will look at him and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of color, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. The worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow....”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But in the church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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 re-fashioned anew for our pleasure in the darkness, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, 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 Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to Heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to overeducate 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.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Realize 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, which are the aims, the false ideals, of our age. 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.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I suppose it comes from the fact that we can't stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“Yes; that is his name. I didn't intend to tell it to you.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the colored image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Lord Henry smiled. “He gives you good advice, I suppose. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

“There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit quietly 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 neither bring ruin upon others nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are, my fame, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks; we will all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray