Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” Quotes (161 Quotes)

Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil, cried Dorian with a wild gesture of despair.

I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life…

Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.

The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. A grasshopper began to chirp by the wall, and like a blue thread a long, thin dragonfly floated past on its brown gauze wings. Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward's heart beating, and wondered what was coming.

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.

Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with yourrose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame…

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.

Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.

You, who know all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! 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 consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.

Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.

Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes...

Eu adoro prazeres triviais. São o último refúgio do complexo.

I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.

It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.

Those who go beneath the surface, do so at their peril.

Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks.

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.

Laughter is not at all a bad beginnig for a friendship, and it is by far the best ending for one.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

What absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given.