• Chapter 1:
  • "Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."
  • "Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty"
  • "Days in summer, Basil, are apt to linger"
  • "I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully."
• Chapter 2:
  • All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity.
  • "There is no such thing as a good influence."
  • "The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for."
  • 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?
• Chapter 3:
  • "If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him."
  • "The betting is on the Americans."

"They don't last, I am told," muttered his uncle.

• There was something fascinating in this son of love and death.
• "Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr. Erskine; "I myself would say that it had merely been detected."
• "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."

• Chapter 4:
  • "As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied."
  • "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."
  • His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his soul, and desire had come to meet it on the way.
  • "He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize."
  • With his beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at.
  • Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin?
• Chapter 10:
  • His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung himself into an arm chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.