Mercedes's Reviews > 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

“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

“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

“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

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
― 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

“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

“Some things are more precious because they don't last long.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. ”
― 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

“I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about. ”
― 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

“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

“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.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“But 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.”
― 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 one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“When good Americans die, they go to Paris'.

'Where do bad Americans go?'

'They stay in America'.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The ugly and 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 never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; my brains, such as they are-- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.”
― 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

“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

“Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.”
― 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 failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story. ”
― 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

“You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“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 over-educate 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. 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

“Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray