• 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 cultivated. For these there is hope.

• There is no such thing as an immoral book.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

• All art is quite useless.
• It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
• But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.
• 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 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.
• The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
• I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
• Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade name of the firm. That is all.
• Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
• 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 like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
• Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.
• 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.
• Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
• There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view. 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 are sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone 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 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. 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 ever dream--I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, 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.
• Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
• You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.
• Man is many things, but he is not rational.
• Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.
• What a fuss people make over fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young me want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: this is all one can say.
• Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.
• Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow... 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; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims...

four

• Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To rest Reality we must see it on the tightrope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.
• The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that it is not emotional.
• Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
• To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies.
• 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.
• he [lord henry] was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
• If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation.
• Nowadays, people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. [prince? i think so.]
• Men marry because they are bored; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
• 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.
• I find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful if you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit a mistake, however. They paint in order to try to look young.
• As long as a woman can look 10 years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
• You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love. A Grande Passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.
• My dear boy, the people who love only one in their lives are the truly shallow people. What they call their loyalty and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of customs of their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failure. Faithfulness... the passion for property is in it. There are many that we would throw away if we were not afraid someone else would pick them up.
• The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.
• You said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears.
• It is only the sacred things that are worth touching.
• 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.
• Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.
• She will make the world as mad as she has made me.
• People are very fond of giving away what they need the most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.
• Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting people in what they are.
• A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetic of creatures. [this is a beautiful beautiful statement.]
• The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible.
• He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.

five/six

• Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes, they forgive them.
• to be in love is to surpass one's self.
• to see him is to worship him, to know him is to trust him.
• I shudder at the thought of being free. (sibyl)
• "Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear basil."
• Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid things, it is always from the noblest of intentions.
• I never approve or disapprove of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. i never take any notice of what common people say, and i never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful.
• The real drawback to marriage is it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.
• 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.
• I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.
• If you want to mar nature, you have merely to reform it. As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women.
• It seemed to me all my life had been narrowed to one perfect point of rose-coloured joy. (dorian & sybil)
• Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about, but i am afraid i cannot claim my theory as my own. It belongs to Nature, not to me. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.
• To be good is to be in harmony with one's self. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One's own life--that is the important thing. (hai michael)
• I should fancy that the real tragedy for the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.
• Nothing is ever quite true.
• Women... inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.
• I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.

seven/eight/nine

• to spiritualize one's age--that is something worth doing. 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.
• Love is a more wonderful thing than Art. [lord henry-> "they are both simply forms of imitation."]
• There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
• The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
• 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. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.
• Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours. 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. Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities of their husbands. They flaunt their conjugal felicity in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a woman once told me; and I can quite understand it. Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all. Yes; there is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life.
• We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
• If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.
• It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is a 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.
• I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists.
• Even now I cannot help feeling that 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. Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
• Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.

eleven

• Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. (dorian)
• Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, the curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet, it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of life that is itself but a moment.
• There are a few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweet 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 whose 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 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 houses, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, 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 colours 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 he had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that 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 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 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 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 the pleasure their pain.

fourteen

• Youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
• There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, to the senses.

fifteen

• Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
• 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.
• What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
• Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.

sixteen

• It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.
• 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. 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 dealing with man Destiny never closed her accounts.
• There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.

seventeen

• 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.
• Skepticism is the beginning of faith.
• To define is to limit.
• Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
• We women, as someone ays, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.
• Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. 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.

eighteen

• Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
• The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.

nineteen

• Death is the only thing that 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.
• I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
• If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
• The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect.
• The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith, and the lesson of Romance.
• 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, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
• You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.