'The Picture of Dorian Gray' Quotes

Oscar Wilde's Epigrams
Lord Henry, Chapter 1 (1)

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

Oscar Wilde's Epigrams
Lord Henry, Chapter 1 (2)

'I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.'

Oscar Wilde's Epigrams
Lord Henry, Chapter 4

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

Hedonism
Lord Henry, Chapter 2 (1)

'The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.'
'Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.'

Hedonism
Lord Henry, Chapter 2 (2)

'Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism - that is what our century wants.'

Art
Oscar Wilde, Preface

'All art is quite useless.'

Art
Basil Hallward, Chapter 1

'An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them... We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.'

Art
Lord Henry, Chapter 4

'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.'

Art (/Women)
Dorian Gray, Chapter 7

'You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent... What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.' (to Sibyl Vane)

Art/ Morality
Lord Henry, Chapter 19

'Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world call immoral are books that show the world its own shame.'

Morality
Basil Hallward, Chapter 1

'You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.'

Morality
Lord Henry, Chapter 1

'I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.'

Influence, Morality
Lord Henry, Chapter 2

'There is no such thing as good influence Mr Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view... to influence a person is to give him one's own soul.'

Morality
Lord Henry, Chapter 4

'Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.'

Morality
James Vane, Chapter 5

''I wish I had, for as sure as there is a God in heaven, if he ever does you any wrong, I shall kill him.' She looked at him in horror. He repeated his words. They cut the air like a dagger.'

Influence, Morality
Chapter 7

'The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would resist temptation.'

Morality
Dorian Gray, Chapter 8

'It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded.' (about Sibyl's death)

Morality
Chapter 10

'No one could see it. He himself would not see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept his youth - that was enough.'

Morality
Chapter 13

'Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil.'

Morality
Chapter 16 (1)

'His soul, certainly, was sick to death. Was it true that the senses could cure it? Innocent blood had been spilled. What could atone for that?'

Morality
Chapter 16 (2)

'He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away.'

Influence
Basil Hallward, Chapter 1

'Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad.'

Influence
Lord Henry, Chapter 2

'When you have lost it you won't smile.'
'Beauty is the wonder of wonders.'
'You will suffer horribly.'

Influence
Chapter 2

'He was amazed at the sudden impression his words had produced.'

Influence
Basil Hallward, Chapter 9

'You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry's influence. I see that.'

Influence
Dorian Gray, Chapter 9

'I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now.'
'I am different, but you must not like me less.'
'I am changed.'

Influence
Chapter 10 (1)

'Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence, and the still more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament... But it was too late now. The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.'

Influence
Chapter 10 (2)

'It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain.'

Influence
Chapter 11

'Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful.'

Influence (/Appearances)
Chapter 13

'The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that marvellous beauty.'
'There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth.'

Youth and Immortality, Influence
Chapter 20

'Youth had spoiled him.'

Youth and Immortality
Chapter 2

'There had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. He understood them now. Life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him.'

Youth and Immortality
Lord Henry, Chapter 2 (1)

'When one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.'

Youth and Immortality
Lord Henry, Chapter 2 (2)

'Youth is the only thing worth having.'

Youth and Immortality
Chapter 7

'That he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.'

Youth and Immortality
Chapter 11

'Charming boyish smile'
'Wonderful youth that never seemed to leave him'

Youth and Immortality
Chapter 16

'Had all the bloom of boyhood, all the unstained purity of youth.'

Youth and Immortality
Lord Henry, Chapter 19

'Youth! There is nothing like it.'

Appearances
Lord Henry, Chapter 1 (1)

'Young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves.'
'He is a Narcissus.'

Appearances
Lord Henry, Chapter 1 (2)

'Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!'

Appearances
Mrs. Vane, Chapter 5

'He has the appearance of being rich.'
'I trust he is one of the aristocracy. He has all the appearance of it, I must say.'
'His good looks are really quite remarkable; everybody notices them.'

Appearances
Basil Hallward, Chapter 9

'You look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come down to my studio to sit for his picture. But you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. You were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. Now, I don't know what has come over you. You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you.'

Appearances
Chapter 11 (1)

'Even those who had heard the most evil things against him -- and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs -- could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him.'

Appearances
Chapter 11 (2)

'There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them.'

Appearances
Basil Hallward, Chapter 12

'At least, I can't believe them when I see you. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.'

Appearances
Chapter 15

'Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our age...'

Appearances
Chapter 20

'When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was.'

Women and Marriage
Lord Henry, Chapter 1

'One charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties...'

Women and Marriage
Dorian Gray, Chapter 4 (1)

'Sibyl? Oh, she was so shy and so gentle. There is something of a child about her.'
'She said quite simply to me, 'You look more like a prince. I must call you Prince Charming.''

Women and Marriage
Dorian Gray, Chapter 4 (2)

'How horrid you are! She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual.' (speaking of Sibyl Vane)

Women and Marriage
Lord Henry, Chapter 4 (1)

'I suppose she will belong to you some day. When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.' (about Sibyl Vane )

Women and Marriage
Lord Henry, Chapter 4 (2)

'My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex.'

Women and Marriage
Lord Henry, Chapter 4 (3)

'Never marry at all Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women marry because they are curious: both are disappointed.'

Women and Marriage
Dorian Gray, Chapter 6

'I want to place her on a pedestal of gold and to see see the world worship the woman who is mine.'

Women and Marriage
Basil Hallward, Chapter 6

'I hope the girl is good, Harry. I don't want to see Dorian tied to some vile creature...'

Women and Marriage
Dorian Gray, Chapter 8

'She had no right to kill herself. It was selfish of her.'

Women and Marriage
Lord Henry, Chapter 8 (1)

'The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.'

Women and Marriage
Lord Henry, Chapter 8 (2)

'The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence...'
'She was less real than they are.'

Sexuality
Basil Hallward, Chapter 9

'From the moment I met you, your personality had the most extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power, by you.'

Sexuality
Chapter 10

'There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.'