More from Dorian Gray

But I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.


A dream of form in days of thought.


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


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.


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.


...The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.


The aim of life is self-development. To realize 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. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us.


It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.