Oscar Wilde quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray #10

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

[Conscience] is the divinest thing in us.

"How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears."

What shall I do? You don't know the danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. She would have done that for me. She had no right to kill herself. It was selfish of her.

p53. [an interesting background] made him more perfect, as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

p22. Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love's tragedies.

p9. Real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

p14. Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.

p16. You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.

p17. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

p18. I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

p19. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.

p22. The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.

p48. - In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack of Radicals.

“-What brings you out so early? I thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible till five." "-Pure family affection, I assure you, Uncle George. I want to get something out of you."

p49. Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

p52. Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity.

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