The Picture of Dorian Gray

"the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life."

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

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

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.

this grey monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins,

an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims....

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

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of hi

his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities;

This bud of love by summer's ripening breath May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet--