“Why didn’t you tell me the only thing worth loving was an actress?” –Dorian Gray
“Don’t run down dyed hair and painted faces. There’s an extraordinary charm in them sometimes.” –Lord Henry
“People like you- the willful sunbeams of life- don’t commit crimes.” –Lord Henry
“It is only the sacred things that are worth touching.” –Lord Henry
“When one is in love, one always begins by decieving one’s self and one always ends by decieving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” –Lord Henry
“Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.” –Lord Henry
“There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.” –Lord Henry
“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 their dust into conciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.” –Dorian Gray
“People are often very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of honesty.” –Lord Henry
“The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.” –Lord Henry
“One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.” –text
“Soul and body, body and soul- how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the physical impulse began?” –text
“I shudder at the thought of being free.” –Sibyl Vane
“To see him is to worship him, to know him is to trust him.” –Sibyl Vane
“…unselfish people are colorless. They lack individuality.” –Lord Henry
“You are much better [as a person] than you pretend to be.” –Basil Hallward
“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.” –Lord Henry
“No life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.” –Lord Henry
“If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.” –Lord Henry
“As for marriage…there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women.” –Lord Henry
“Of course it is sudden; all really delightful things are.” –Dorian Gray
“Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth.” –Dorian Gray
“I cannot understand how anyone can wish to shame the thing he loves.” –Dorian Gray
“Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about.” –Lord Henry
“Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is the grossest form of immorality.” –Lord Henry
“The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privlege of the rich.” –Lord Henry
“Nothing is ever quite true.” –Lord Henry
“A cigarette is the perfect type of the perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” –Lord Henry
“I have known everything, but I am always ready for a new emotion.” –Lord Henry
“I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.” –Sibyl Vane
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