کتاب The Picture of Dorian Gray

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed."

we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly."

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic."

"What are you?" "To define is to limit."

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones."

You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."

to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts.

Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. 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 like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

But 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 moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

"Dorian Gray? Is that his name?" asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward. "Yes, that is his name. I didn't intend to tell it to you." "But why not?" "Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. However, I don't propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.