“Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts.” 

“Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.” 

“There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.” 

“If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart” 

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

“There is a fatality about good resolutions – that they are always made too late” 

“Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible” 

“Oh I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.” 

“Love! What is love? It's nothing. It's just a word. It doesn't exist. Only pleasure is important.” 

“Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.” 

“Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing character''

“The sky was pure opal now.” 

“Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.” 

“Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.” 

“One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.” 

“Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.” 

“Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.” 

“I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.” 

“He wants to enslave you.'

'I shudder at the thought of being free.” 

“If one were to live his life fully and completely were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream.” 

“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!” 

“Women treat us [men] like humanity treats gods – they worship us and keep bothering us to do something.” 

“Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef.” 

“Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.” 

“You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.” 

“But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.” 

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

“Basil my dear boy puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices his principles and his common sense. 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. A great poet a really great poet is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” 

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.” 

“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.” 

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

“What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord Henry. " A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.” 

“One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.” 

“Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy.” 

“What are you?" "To define is to limit.” 

“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” 

“What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.” 

“You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself.” 

“I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.” 

“The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort.” 

“Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.” 

“The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,

made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.” 

“She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.” 

“Out of the unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off... p 207” 

“The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.”