Цитаты из книги Portretul lui Dorian Gray

One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

Human life,—that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating.

so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others

The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves.

it is personalities, not principles, that move the age

His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his Soul, and Desire had come to meet it on the way.

Why didn’t you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?’ ‘Because I have loved so many of them, Dorian.’

Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in one of them. They ride in the Park in the morning, and chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile, and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious. But an actress! How different an actress is!

I must admit I was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing Shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place.

The lon- ger I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us.

It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding-cake.

Faithlessness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the intellectual life,—simply a confession of failure.

people who only love once in their lives are really shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or the lack of imagination.

You will always be loved, and you will always be in love with love.

the search for beauty is the poisonous secret of life

I used to look at every one who passed me, and wonder with a mad curiosity what sort of lives they led. Some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations.

I felt that this gray, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its splendid sinners, and its sordid sins, as you once said, must have something in store for me.

As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society.

no woman is a genius: women are a decorative sex.

I don’t think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love.