The Picture of Dorian Gray

"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming."

"I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us."

"Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face."

"The worst vice is advice."

"Passion makes one think in a circle."

"I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world."

"The very essence of romance is uncertainty."

"One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."

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

"Conscience is a handicap, not a guide."

"Life imitates art far more than art imitates life."

"If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened."

"There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love."

"The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself."

"She had not known him. He had passed out of her life like a dream."

"Ah, but what a wonderful life you have had! Your meeting with Miss Sibil Vane was fate."

"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws."

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."

"Beauty is a form of genius–is higher, indeed, than genius."

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

"I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy."

"What is past is of no consequence. The present is what matters."

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

"To define is to limit."

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"All art is quite useless."

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it."