Daily Digest

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

“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.”

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”

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

“To define is to limit.”

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

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

“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“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.”

“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

“Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.”

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

“I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”

“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.”

“Women have no appreciation of good looks-at least, good women have not.”

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

“As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

“Punctuality is the thief of time.”

“To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honor”

“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”

“The only horrible thing in the world is ennui.”

“Even things that are true can be proved.”

“It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”

“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.”

“So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape (...)”

“What fire does not destroy, it hardens”

“The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

“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.”

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

“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 moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

“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.”

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

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

“I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”

“The ugly and stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live-- undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They never bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Henry; 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.”

“I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.”

“Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them.”

“Я верю в величие нации. — Оно только пережиток предприимчивости и напористости. — В нём залог развития. — Упадок мне милее. — А как же искусство? — Оно — болезнь. — А любовь? — Иллюзия. — А религия? — Распространённый суррогат веры. — Вы скептик. — Ничуть! Ведь скептицизм — начало веры. — Да кто же вы? — Определить — значит ограничить. — Ну дайте мне хоть нить!.. — Нити обрываются. И вы рискуете заблудиться в лабиринте”

“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.”