48 Quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray book by Oscar Wilde
Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 48 quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray book by Oscar Wilde that I underlined while reading the book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Quotes on Women
- Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them.
- I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.
- How fond women are of doing dangerous things! It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
- We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.
- 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.
- Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
- Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
Quotes on Life
- As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.
- One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
- To become the spectator of one's own life, is to escape the suffering of 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.
Quotes on Love
- Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.
- My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure.
- Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
Quotes on Destiny
- 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.
- As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
Quotes on Youth
- Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you.
- We never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!
More Quotes
- Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
- Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.
- The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
- The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.
- The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
- We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.
- The only horrible thing in the world is ennui. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.
- Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. That is one of the most important secrets of life.
- The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
- Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
- The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
- Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
- Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
- American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past.
- I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
- I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.
- Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
- The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.
- I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty.
- I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
- One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
- Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.
- The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing characteristic. Yes, an absolutely reasonable people. I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans.
- The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
- It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
- It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
- Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
- When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
- I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.
- Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.