Oscar Wilde quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray #7

[T]he way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.

Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.

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

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.

The inherited stupidity of the race (…) was shown to be the proper bulwark for society.

It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.

To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul. Yes, that was the secret.

[T]hough forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget.

It is said that passion makes one think in a circle. From cell to cell of his brain crept the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible of all man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling nerve and fibre. Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality.

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault.

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

There is a fatality about good resolutions--that they are always made too late.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.

That awful memory of woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

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