Best quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray

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

You know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget. When I close my eyes, I hear them, and each of them says something different. I don’t know which to follow.

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

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

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

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

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

I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more-at least not before me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.

[Chapter 8]

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

Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.

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