Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
147 quotes
"Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude."
"Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not."
"the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life."
"I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel."
"It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free."
"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."
"We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. 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. The thoroughly well-informed man - that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value."
"Most people are boring and stupid."
"He wants to enslave you.''I shudder at the thought of being free."
"I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."
"Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
"Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something."
"loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin."
"As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her daughter, she is perfectly satisfied"
"Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders."
"To be popular one must be a mediocrity.""Not with Women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as someone says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.""It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmered Dorian."
"She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious."
"A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on."
"She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences."
"Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination.They are limited to their century. No glamour every transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them."
"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."
"Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in the dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it."
"People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."
"She is a peacock in everything but beauty!"
"I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours."