Oscar Wilde quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray #3

I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.

As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women.

Of course, it is sudden-- all really delightful things are.

p90. Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

[P]eople who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.

p71. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect--simply a confession of failure. Faithfulness! (…) The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

[W]hatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.

p73. Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious.

p68. [U]ltimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look young. ...

p57. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.

p58. I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.

p59- There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain.

The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

p60. To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies.

[T]he only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

p65. I like Wagner's music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.

p66. - I never talk during music--at least, during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation.

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