“They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about. ”
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed.”
“Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”
“The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.”
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
“I know what conscience is, to begin with […] It is the divinest thing in us […] I want to be good. I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous.”
“To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self.”
“The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play.”
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
“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.”
″‘Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil,’ cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.”
“There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful.”
“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”
“I make a great difference between people. 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 have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.”
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
“There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”
“Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.”
“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.”
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.”
“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.”
“Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do.”
“Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.”
“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.”
“People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”
