“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.” 

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” 

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?” 

“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” 

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.” 

“There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.” 

“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” 

“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.” 

“You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.” 

“I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.” 

“My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect---simply a confession of failures. Faithfulness! I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on with your story. ” 

“It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.” 

“Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.” 

“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself.” 

“I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue.” 

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

“Yes, very sensible... People die of common sense, Dorian, one lost moment at a time. Life is a moment. There is no hereafter. So make it burn always with the hardest flame.” 

“Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.” 

“Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to someone who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day.” 

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine. 

To fill the hour – that is happiness.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their aint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.

And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.

All the good of nature is the soul’s, and may be had, if paid for in nature’s lawful coin, that is, by labor which the heart and the head allow.

I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new burdens.

“Most people are boring and stupid.” 

“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.” 

“A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.” 

“Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity.” 

“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. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I daresay, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life.” 

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

“Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.” 

“She is a peacock in everything but beauty!” 

“But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.” 

“The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly-that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.” 

“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” 

“It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words.” 

“She knew nothing but she had everything he had lost.” 

“I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.” 

“I didn't say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.” 

“In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all. ” 

“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about it's use. It is hitting below the intellect.” 

“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."

"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.” 

“As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.” 

“every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait 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 coloured canvas, reveals himself.”