- "She spiritualizes them, and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 7 - "If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. This marriage is quite right. I did not think so at first, but I admit it now. The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you are incomplete."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 7 - "It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting. Besides, I don't suppose you will want your wife to act. So what does it matter if she plays Juliet like a wooden doll? She is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 7 - "You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realised the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 7 - "The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 7 - "His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all. There were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 8 - "I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more-at least not before me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 8 - "But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl ever really lived, and so she has never really died."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 8 - "For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 8 - "You look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come down to my studio to sit for his picture. But you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. You were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world. Now, I don't know what had come over you. You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry's influence, I see that."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 9 - "Yes, there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life, and to save from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 11 - "There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realise his conception of the beautiful."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 11 - "I keep a diary of my life from day to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written. I shall show it to you if you come with me."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 12 - "What is it that one was taught to say in one's boyhood? 'Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins. Wash away our iniquities.' Let us say that together. The prayer of your pride has bee answered. The prayer of your repentance will be answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 13 - "Innocent blood had been split. What could atone for that? Ah! for that there was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 16 - "Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 17 - "Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know someone who had committed a real murder."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 18 - "'what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose'-how does the quotation run?-'his own soul'?"
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 19 - "There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins,' but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 20 - "It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it."
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Ch. 20
'The Picture of Dorian Gray' Quotes
Oscar Wilde's Famous (and Controversial) Novel
By Esther Lombardi, About.com Guide
The Picture of Dorian Gray
W.W. Norton & Company
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