Портрет Дориана Грея

to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul

Dorian’s whims are laws to everybody, except himself.

The audience probably thought it was a duet. When Aunt Agatha sits down to the piano she makes quite enough noise for two people

The world is wide, and has many marvel- lous people in it. Don’t take away from me the one person that makes life absolutely lovely to me

Those who are faithful know only the pleasures of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.

The harmony of soul and body, — how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is bestial, an ideality that is void.

If one puts forward an idea to a real Englishman,— always a rash thing to do,— he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it one’s self.

I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.

A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies

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

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

I like to find out people for myself. But poor Lady Brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. She either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one wants to know.

I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows.

A curious instinct of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

You know we poor painters have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to re- mind the public that we are not savages.

I can believe anything, provided that it is incredible

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a por- trait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself

I believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues.

the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties