Quotes on Portrait Of Dorian Gray

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.

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.

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

You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

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

It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But... it is better to be good than to be ugly.

I can sympathize with everything, except suffering.

How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… . If it were only the other way! 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! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.

Young men want to be faithful, and are not. Old men want to be faithless, and cannot.

It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.