The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

1. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

2. It is the spectator, and not life, that at really mirrors.
3. All art is quite useless.
4. For there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being
talked about.
5. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
6. He is some brainless, beautiful creature.
7. We shall all suffer for what the gods have given us.
8. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
9. It is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
10. Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the
firm. That is all.
11. Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
12. A man cannot be too carefull in the choice of his enemies.
13. None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
14. The more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be.
15. I like persons better than principles.
16. An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
17. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.
18. And the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.
19. To influence a person is to give him one’s own soul.
20. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for
him.
21. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
22. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
23. Suddenly there had come someone across his life who seemed to have disclosed to him life’s
mystery.
24. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again.
25. The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little
longer… in that case, let our friendship be a caprice.
26. The life that was to make his soul would mar his body.
27. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.
28. Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows
quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
29. She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.
30. Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.
31. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
32. He could be made a Titan or a toy.
33. We practical men like to see things not to read about them.
34. The less said about life’s sores the better.
35. Humanity takes itself too seriously.
36. To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.
37. Yes, he continued, that is one of the great secrets of life. 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.
38. No one talks so wonderfully as you do.
39. All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me, if you care to.
40. He was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
41. Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
42. My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to
say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men
represent the triumph of mind over morals.
43. There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very
useful. The other women are very charming.
44. You filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life.
45. A grande passion is a privilege of people who have nothing to do.
46. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick
them up.
47. The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers
is not good enough for us.
48. Les grande-peres ont toujours tort.
49. It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian.
50. Looks as if she had seen better days.
51. Sibyl is the only thing I care about. What is it to me where she came from?
52. I love her, and I must make her love me.
53. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad.
54. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the
depth of generosity.
55. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in
what they are.
56. He lives the poetry he cannot write.
57. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the
mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the
effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions
and the intellect.
58. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. Experience as of
no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
59. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past.
60. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really
experimenting on ourselves.
61. Love is more than money.
62. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.
63. I know it pains you to talk about our father. But it only pains you because you loved him so
much.
64. He was like a common gardener walking with a rose.
65. He was heart-sick at leaving home.
66. Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they
forgive them.
67. To be in love is to surpass one’s self.
68. When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.
69. To see him is to worship him, to know him is to trust him.
70. Love makes people good.
71. To see him is perfect happiness.
72. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
73. I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.
74. The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves.
75. To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self.
76. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit.
77. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of
beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness
and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration,
worthy of the adoration of the world.
78. There are only two kinds of people that are really fascinating – people who know absolutely
everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
79. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real.
80. You have made me understand what love really is.
81. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you
realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art.
82. There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to
love.
83. Besides, women are better suited to beat sorrow than men.
84. That we live in an age where unnecessary things are our only necessities.
85. He was afraid of certainty.
86. Anything would be better that this dreadful state of doubt.
87. 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.
88. There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late.
89. One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details.
90. The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
91. Ordinary women always console themselves.
92. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five
who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history.
93. You have explained me to myself.
94. We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
95. If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.
96. What is done is done. What is past is past.
97. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.
98. I cannot repeat an emotion.
99. I don’t offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any.
100. For in such mad worship there is peril, the peril of losing them.
101. It is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the
work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy.
102. Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words.
103. No man came across two ideal things. Few come across one.
104. It was with an almost cruel joy – and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every
pleasure, cruelty has its place.
105. The more he knew, the more he desired to know.
106. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can
multiply our personalities.
107. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.
108. Every gentleman is interested in his good name.
109. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face.
110. One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends.
111. Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil.
112. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them.
113. To the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.
114. Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.
115. They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early because they
have so little to think about. Pg 202
116. People who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends.
117. The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes.
118. It is perfectly monstrous.
119. When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man
marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
120. Narborough wasn’t perfect… If he had been, you would not have loved him.
121. Women loves us for our defects. If we have enough of them they will forgive us
everything, even our intellects.
122. Life is a great disappointment.
123. A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
124. She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
125. It is the feet of clay that make the gold image precious.
126. What fire does not destroy, it hardens.
127. It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.
128. Ugliness was the one reality.
129. As long as one has his stuff, one doesn’t want friends.
130. One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders.
Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it.
131. Let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your own hands.
132. I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good.
133. It is better to be good than to be ugly.
134. Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues.
135. To define is to limit.
136. All good hats are made out of nothing.
137. Like all good reputations, every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be
popular one must be a mediocrity.
138. A burnt child loves the fire.
139. Women are not always allowed a choice.
140. Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination.
141. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend.
142. How fond women are of doing dangerous things.
143. It is an annoying subject. It has no psychological value at all.
144. Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there.
145. Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even
of one’s worst habits.
146. Oh! Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often.
147. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
148. Like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart.
149. If man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
150. What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul.
151. I asked you because I thought you might be able to give me an answer.
152. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true.
153. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up
early, or be respectable.
154. The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
155. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had
once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had
come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play – I tell you,
Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
156. Life has been your art.
157. It is because I am going to be good. I am a little changed already.
158. You and I are what, we are, and will be what we will be.
159. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence
upon action.
160. Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one
knew who he was.
161. There was purification in punishment.