Quotes · verified word for word in the text
The Picture of Dorian Gray quotes
11 quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #26740 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter II
Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter IV
"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
— Spoken by a character · Chapter II
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter I
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter XIX
"To define is to limit."
— Spoken by a character · Chapter XVII
every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
— Basil Hallward · Chapter I
I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter IX
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.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter IV
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.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter III