- “Human life – that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.”
- “There is nothing that art cannot express.”
- “We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to a be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.”
- “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.”
- “He sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.”
- “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
- “But beauty, real beauty, ends where intellectual expression begins… Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.”
- “He is some brainless beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.”
- “If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.”
- “I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us.”
- “The one charm of marriage is that it makes life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.”
- “We tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces.”
- “You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.”
- “Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
- “When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul…”
- “Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship and it is far best ending for one.”
- “You like everyone; that is to say, you are indifferent to everyone.”
- “I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
- “I will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope.”
- “Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel 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… Days in summer are apt to linger.”
- “Genius lasts longer then 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 mind with rubbish and facts.”
- “The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”
- “He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.”
- “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
- “Always! That is a dreadful word… Women are fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.”
- “Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow.”
- “He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
- “Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men give to their mistakes.”
- “Women defend themselves by attacking.”
- “When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.”
- “I never approve or disapprove of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take toward life. We are not sent into this world to air our moral prejudices. I never notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.
- “The real drawback of marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colorless. They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egoism and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man’s existence.”
- “The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid of ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. “
- “As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.”
- “To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life – that is the important thing.”
- “Women … whatever they ask for they had first given to us… They create love in our natures. They have a right to demand it back.”
- “women are better suited to bear sorrow than men”
- “Life has always poppies in her hands.”
- “The one charm of the past is that it is in the past.”
- “It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is a 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 suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists.”
- “No man came across two ideal things. Few came across one.”
- “The past could always be annihilated; regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.”
- “There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamored of death, or one of those nights of horror and missed joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself…”
- “He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high indifference of joy.”
- “Strong passion must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.”
- “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.”
- “One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.”
- “My own personality has become a burden for men.”
- “In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.”
- “Life is a question of nerves, and fibers and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color 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… it is on things like these that our lives depend.”
- “Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it… Because one can survive everything nowadays except that.”
~ Oscar Wilde (‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’)