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Book beginning: page 5

Explanation: what follows below are the quotations of Dorian's theories throughout the novel, in listed form. They have been grouped together under suggested titles to make the information more manageable. The groups have been sorted according to how many characters share said groups, so that comparison is easier when scrolling through, i.e. a group title appearing in all three lists is at the top, and a group title appearing in only one list will be found towards the bottom. These group titles are only one way to consider the meaning of the quotations, and are by no means the correct or only way of interpreting them.

Each quote within a group has been ordered by page number, so that a character’s evolution can be more easily recognised. Some theories are said by one character but are actually originally the thoughts of another, in these cases, the quotation is under the original character and indicated as said by another.

Dorian’s Theories

Conclusions of life

• I know what conscience is […] it is the divinest thing in us. (p94)
• There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution. (p94)
• Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts. (p125)
• [Life’s] aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. […] It was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment. (p126)
• It may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, […] a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret. […] It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray to be the true object […] of life. (p127)
• No theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. (p128)
• There was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life. (p129)
• Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. (p130)
• Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him. (p150)
• The wild desire to live [was] the most terrible of all man’s appetites. (p177)
• Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. (p177-178)
• One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders. Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. […] In her dealings with man Destiny never closed her accounts. (p181)
• In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. (p191)
• Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. (p191)
• The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. (p205)

“Man”

• It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. (p105)
• I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists. (p106)
• Man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. (p137)
• I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have searched for pleasure. (p189)
• With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments […] strong passions must either bruise or bend. (p192)

Sin

• There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful. (p140)
• I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself don’t interest me. They have not got the charm of novelty. (p143)
• The secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation. (p152)
• Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day. (p155)
• There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. (p155-156)
• Things that were dangerous had to be destroyed. (p174)
• There was purification in punishment. Not ‘Forgive us our sins’ but ‘Smite us for our iniquities’ should be the prayer of man to a most just God. (p210)

The passing of time

• The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. (p115)

Society

• We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities. (p91)
• Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. (p136)
• The canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. (p136-137)
• Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be. (p142)
• In this country it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. (p144)

Women

• Ordinary women never appeal to one’s imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. (p51)
• I should have said that whatever [women] ask for they had first given to us. They create Love in our natures. They have a right to demand it back. (p77)
• Women give to men the very gold of their lives. (p77)
• I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting. (p179-180)

Marriage

• What is marriage? An irrevocable vow. (p75)

Love

• Why didn’t you tell me [Henry] that the only thing worth loving is an actress? (p51)
• I cannot understand how any one can wish to shame the things he loves. (p75)
• To the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. (p157)
• Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. (p192)

Youth

• Youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms. (p155)
• What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. (p210)

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin Classics, 2009.