The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” (The Picture of Dorian Gray Quotes)
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Ah! 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. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Beauty is a form of genius – is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it. Because, one can survive everything nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I think you are wrong, but I won’t argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, that gives reality to things.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible….”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour 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, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“My dear boy, anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failure.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. That is one of the most important secrets of life.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“One regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Perhaps one never seems so much at one’s ease as when one has to play a part.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals!”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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 that 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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing characteristic. Yes, an absolutely reasonable people. I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The only horrible thing in the world is ennui. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The thoroughly well-informed man – that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“To become the spectator of one’s own life, is to escape the suffering of life.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“We never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“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.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Who, that knew anything about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.”
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
