Quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray
23 notable lines from Oscar Wilde · 1890
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 1 Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 4 All art is quite useless.
Preface 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.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 2 There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Preface Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 1 Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 2 If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything!
Dorian Gray, Ch. 2 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.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 4 Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Narrator on Lord Henry, Ch. 4 There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 2 To define is to limit.
Lord Henry Wotton We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 2 Beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 2 Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 1 I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 3 The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away.
Dorian Gray, Ch. 19 Each of us has heaven and hell in him.
Dorian Gray, Ch. 13 Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.
Basil Hallward, Ch. 12 The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Lord Henry Wotton, Ch. 19 We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
Preface It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was.
Closing line, Ch. 20