Quotes from book

The Picture of Dorian Gray

“My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”

“The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away.”

“I am happy in my prison of passion”

“I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.”

“And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

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

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”

“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.”

“When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.”

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

“You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

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

“Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes”

“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.”

“Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.”

“When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy.”

“Man is many things, but he is not rational.”

“It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.”