Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray Quotes
When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.
It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.
I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
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.
...art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.
I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.
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.
Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
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.
It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.
It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worse habits.
What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry.
To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
And, certainly to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us.
It is simply expression, as Henry says, that gives reality to things.
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.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.
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.
They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.
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.
My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows.
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied
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. That was all.
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.