The Picture of Dorian Gray

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.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

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

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never bee

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."

"every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.

there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.