Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."

"Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different."

"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."

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

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

"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."

"What fire does not destroy, it hardens"

"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

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

"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 marvelous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized 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"

"She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain."

"The only horrible thing in the world is ennui."

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."

"But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to."

"To define is to limit."

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."

"The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

"You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."

"A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her."