The Picture of Dorian Gray

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them."

"There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies."

"Conscience is a coward."

"I wonder what the rest of my life will be. Don't think about the future."

"What a thing it is to be at war with oneself!"

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

"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."

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"When Genius dies, Mediocrity buries it."

"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike."

"The only way for a woman to behave to a woman who behaves badly is to behave worse."

"He had not been in the house for years, not since Lord Henry had come with that strange letter."

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

"Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal."

"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things."

"The only person who knows you is yourself, yet even you don't fully know yourself."

"I can forgive my enemies for not being Aristoteles; the Germans cannot forgive me for being Goethe."

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

"What a fuss people make about fidelity! Why, even in love it is purely a question of physiology."

"The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young."

"Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!"

"He had always been self-centered, but to a wonderful degree, consciously self-centered."

"What fire does not the eye that follows beauty carry within it?"

"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects."

"Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed."

"The man who regards his own life as a matter of importance so great that he dare not waste a single moment of it."

"I suppose the more one knows the more one discovers that ignorance was bliss."

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."