"The Picture of Dorian Gray" sentence starters
❝ There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. ❞
❝ The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. ❞
❝ We shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly. ❞
❝ I have grown to love secrecy. ❞
❝ Your cynicism is simply a pose. ❞
❝ You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. ❞
❝ Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. ❞
❝ I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. ❞
❝ A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. ❞
❝ Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain. ❞
❝ None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. ❞
❝ I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. ❞
❝ There is nothing that art cannot express. ❞
❝ The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. ❞
❝ My heart shall never be put under their microscope. ❞
❝ It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. ❞
❝ I feel 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.” ❞
❝ 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. ❞
❝ Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies. ❞
❝ People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. ❞
❝ Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. ❞
❝ Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. ❞
❝ The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. ❞
❝ Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. ❞
❝ You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know. ❞
❝ Wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? ❞
❝ Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. ❞
❝ 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 like your art better than your friends. ❞
❝ I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. ❞
❝ Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything. ❞
❝ Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly upon it. ❞
❝ Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. ❞
❝ The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. ❞
❝ I can sympathize with everything except suffering. ❞
❝ Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different. ❞
❝ 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. ❞
❝ You are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing. ❞
❝ I am always late on principle, the principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. ❞
❝ I adore it, but I am afraid of it. It makes me too romantic. ❞
❝ Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. ❞
❝ Passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. ❞
❝ If I ever did a crime, I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me. ❞
❝ 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. ❞
❝ There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies. ❞
❝ 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 their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. ❞
❝ People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity. ❞
❝ The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. ❞
❝ It often happens that when we think we were experimenting on others we are really experimenting on ourselves. ❞
❝ Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. ❞
❝ To be in love is to surpass one’s self. ❞
❝ Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window. ❞
❝ Our proverbs want rewriting. They were made in winter, and it is summer now; springtime for me, I think, a very dance of blossoms in blue skies. ❞
❝ I shudder at the thought of being free. ❞
❝ I know you would never harm anyone I love, would you? ❞
❝ Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives. ❞
❝ Of course, it is sudden—all really delightful things are. ❞
❝ 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. ❞
❝ Unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. ❞
❝ You are much better than you pretend to be. ❞
❝ I cannot understand how anyone can wish to shame the thing he loves. ❞
❝ When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy. ❞
❝ The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich. ❞
❝ Being adored is a nuisance. ❞
❝ You are dreadful! I don’t know why I like you so much. ❞
❝ You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit. ❞
❝ Love is a more wonderful thing than art. ❞
❝ There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. ❞
❝ The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. ❞
❝ I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. ❞
❝ You taught me what reality really is. ❞
❝ You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. ❞
❝ I have grown sick of shadows. ❞
❝ You don’t know what you were to me, once. ❞
❝ You have spoiled the romance of my life. ❞
❝ Without your art, you are nothing. ❞
❝ There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. ❞
❝ There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. ❞
❝ I can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous. ❞
❝ You cut life to pieces with your epigrams. ❞
❝ Things like that make a man fashionable in Paris. But in London people are so prejudiced. ❞
❝ One should never make one’s début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age. ❞
❝ How extraordinarily dramatic life is! ❞
❝ I don’t think I am heartless. Do you? ❞
❝ The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her. ❞
❝ Life has everything in store for you, ❞
❝ We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. ❞
❝ If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things. ❞
❝ You must not tell me about things. What is done is done. What is past is past. ❞
❝ I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them. ❞
❝ You talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. ❞
❝ if I told you, you might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at me. I could not bear your doing either of those two things. ❞
❝ Your friendship is dearer to me than any fame or reputation. ❞
❝ You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. ❞
❝ Whatever I have done that is good, I owe to you. ❞
❝ There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own. ❞
❝ Perhaps one should never put one’s worship into words. ❞
❝ There seems to be something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance. ❞
❝ It has a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself—something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. ❞
❝ The past can always be annihilated. ❞
❝ How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful. ❞
❝ Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. ❞
❝ I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else. ❞
❝ I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty. ❞
❝ You don’t want people to talk of you as something vile and degraded. ❞
❝ You must not say things like that. They are horrible, and they don’t mean anything. ❞
❝ You have had more to do with my life than you think. ❞
❝ Each of us has heaven and hell in him. ❞
❝ Youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms. ❞
❝ Keep your horrible secrets to yourself. They don’t interest me any more. ❞
❝ What is it to me what devil’s work you are up to? ❞
❝ I wish you had a thousandth part of the pity for me that I have for you. ❞
❝ The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes. ❞
❝ I am not at all surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked. ❞
❝ It is perfectly monstrous, the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true. ❞
❝ Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men. ❞
❝ Everybody I know says you are very wicked. ❞
❝ I like men who have a future and women who have a past. ❞
❝ Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast. ❞
❝ He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by being always absolutely overeducated. He is a very modern type. ❞
❝ What do you want? Money? Here it is. Don’t ever talk to me again. ❞
❝ Each man lives his own life and pays his own price for living it. ❞
❝ The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for. ❞
❝ I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand, no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly. ❞
❝ To be popular one must be a mediocrity. ❞
❝ 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. ❞
❝ I wish I could love, but I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the desire. ❞
❝ My own personality has become a burden to me. ❞
❝ Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. ❞
❝ The world has always worshipped you. It always will worship you. ❞
❝ Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets. ❞
❝ The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all. ❞
❝ The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history. ❞
