Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray Quotes
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.
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person!
The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.
But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
If I could get back my youth, I'd do anything in the world except get up early, take exercise or be respectable.
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.
What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity.
Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
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.
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
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.
I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.
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.
The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.
And Beauty is a form of Genius - is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation.
His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.
Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought:
You told me you had destroyed it.""I was wrong. It has destroyed me.
What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord Henry. " A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
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.
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
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 forever. It is a meaningless word, too.
A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.
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.
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
