"Either this wallpaper goes, or I do."

"Within this restless, hurried, modern worldWe took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,And now the white sails of our ship are furled,And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,For very weeping is my gladness fled,Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to theeNo more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spellOf viols, or the music of the seaThat sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell."

"A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

"The English novels are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed. But one should not be too severe on them. They show a want of knowledge that must be the result of years of study."

"It was always once springtime in my heart."

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

"I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike."

"It would be unfair to expect other people to be as brilliant as oneself."

"Romantic literature is in effect imaginative lying."

"Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing."

"There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new."

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."

"Tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play- I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend."

"Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude."

"I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything."

"I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me, before.'A dream of form in days of thought'."

"The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."

"To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life."

"The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live-undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are-my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks-we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly."

"You are unjust to women in England. And till you count what is a a shame in a woman to be an infamy in a man, you will always be unjust, and Right, that pillar of fire, and Wrong, that pillar of cloud, will be made dim to your eyes, or be not seen at all, or if seen, not regarded."

"If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward."

"I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous."

"Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea."

"Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read."

"I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."

"If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female."

"To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead."

"In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?"

"Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life."

"It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret."

"It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings."

"Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand For I am drowning in a stormier sea Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lieIf this night before God's throne should stand."

"Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves?"

"Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable."

"There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer."

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

"And yet it was not the mystery, but the comedy of suffering that struck him; its absolute uselessness, its grotesque want of meaning. How incoherent everything seemed! How lacking in all harmony! He was amazed at the discord between the shallow optimism of the day, and the real facts of existence. He was still very young."

"There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch of the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not."

"But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting."

"I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance."

"The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it."

"The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world's sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer."

"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected."

"I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one."

"Punctuality is the thief of time."

"It is very difficult sometimes to keep awake, especially at church, but there is no difficulty at all about sleeping."

"Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef."

"I give the truths of to-morrow.""I prefer the mistakes of today."

"Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef ... Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees..."