Oscar Wilde quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray #1

p64. [P]unctuality is the thief of time.

p86. She was free in her prison of passion.

p70. You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love.

I don't desire to change anything in England except the weather.

I adore [good music], but I am afraid of it. It makes me too romantic.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any 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.

p81. - One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.

p82. There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?

p83. His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences, yet it was not a simple, but rather a very complex passion.

p84. - What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination, changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous.

Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious.

It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

p69. [T]he search for beauty [is] the real secret of life.

[T]he only thing worth loving is an actress.

p74. It is only the sacred things that are worth touching.

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

p77. There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.

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