The Picture of Dorian Gray

"Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having."

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.

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.

People say sometimes that beauty is only 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....

The inherited stupidity of the race--sound English common sense he jovially termed it--was shown to be the proper bulwark for society.

"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."

"one can survive everything nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past,"