The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

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

I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty.

That accounts for the fact that 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.

It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, and old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before he was thirty.

"I love him," she said simply

To know him is to trust him.

"Women are wonderfully practical," murmured Lord Henry, "much more practical than we are. In situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us."

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

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us.

Life has always poppies in her hands.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

...scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.

He was determined that he would not think about what had happened until it became absolutely necessary that he should do so.

Life is a great disappointment.

There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.

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

I suppose she will be married some day to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman. Well, the fact of having met you, and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband, and she will be wretched.

Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often.