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."
204 Quotes
"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
"So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not."
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
"It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."
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 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
"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
"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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