Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
204 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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"You are not listening to a word I am saying . . . and I am making the most delightful plans for your future."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Lord Henry smiled. "He gives you good advice, I suppose. People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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. 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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... Your rank and wealth, Harry; 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
"The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"To realise one's nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play. I tell you Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. 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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"My dear boy, the people who only love 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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"I give the truths of to-morrow."I prefer the mistakes of today."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them... His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Utterly, irrevocably, lost"
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
"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."
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
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