Quotes from book

The Picture of Dorian Gray

“She is a peacock in everything but beauty!”

“Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone 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.”

“But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.”

“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”

“Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.”

“Most people are boring and stupid.”

“Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.”

“Yes, very sensible… People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.”

“I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.”

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

“What fire does not destroy, it hardens”

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.”

“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.”

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”

“You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”

“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

“If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.”

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.”

“He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.”