Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

"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."

"When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy."

"To define is to limit."

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

"What fire does not destroy, it hardens"

"Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

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

"It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."

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

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

"Jemanden zu beeinflussen bedeutet, ihm eine fremde Seele zu geben."

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

"But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality."

"There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him."

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

"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."

"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"