The Picture of Dorian Gray

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

"Murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner."

"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream."

"The secret to remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming."

"I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."

"One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards."

"What is past is of little account. The present is what counts."

"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know."

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that very existence of that world is a form of a joke."

"There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is immoral."

"I wish I could love as you do, but I seem to have lost the faculty of love."

"The only way to atone for acting badly is to act well."

"It is what you are that matters, not what you have been."

"Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins."

"One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation."

"The greatest love is a love that makes you a better person, yet I'm not sure such a thing exists."

"It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution."

"If a man needs an excuse for loving anyone, he has not much claim to love at all."

"The mind has its mysteries, as the body has its diseases."

"What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

"I have never given myself away, even in the midst of temptation."

"Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect."

"Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress."

"When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving oneself, and one always ends by deceiving others."

"Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes."

"There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog the faltering steps of the stage actor."

"The only tragedy in life is to grow old."

"Youth! There is nothing like it."