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Book beginning: page 5

Explanation: what follows below are the quotations of Lord Henry’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.

Lord Henry’s Theories

“I am afraid I cannot claim my theory as my own. It belongs to Nature.” (p76)

Conclusions of life

• 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. (p15)
• (Said “as if he had summed up the world in a phrase”): Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies. (p15)
• One’s own soul, and the passions of one’s friends – those were the fascinating things in life. (p15)
• The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. (p20)
• 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. (p20)
• Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. (p25)
• There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. (p37)
• Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. (p42)
• It is only the sacred things that are worth touching. (p52)
• Human life – that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. (p56)
• As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning. (p57)
• No life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it. (p73)
• Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about. (p75)
• The only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question – simple curiosity. (p75)
• Individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality. (p76)
• Medieval art is charming, but medieval emotions are out of date. One can use them in fiction, of course. But then the only things one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is. (p76)
• Nothing is ever quite true. (p77)
• (Said by Dorian): to become the spectator of one’s own life, is to escape the suffering of life. (p107)
• Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. (p186)
• We can have but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. (p188)
• The only horrible thing in the world is ennui. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness. (p194)
• Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often. That is one of the most important secrets of life. (p203)
• The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of Faith, and the lesson of Romance. (p205)
• Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. (p206)

“Man”

• A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. (p11)
• The probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be. (p12)
• It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. (p14)
• People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. (p20)
• I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. (p29)
• The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of Science is that it is not emotional. (p41)
• 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. (p41)
• There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up. (p49)
• Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour. (p53)
• Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always for the noblest motives. (p72)
• I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. (p72)
• 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. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. (p73)
• Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all. (p99)
• What fire does not destroy, it hardens. (p173)
• Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate. (p200)
• One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner. (p203)
• If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart. (p204)

Sin

• There is no such thing as a good influence. All influence is immoral. […] To influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts. (p20)
• The bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. […] We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. […] The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. (p21)
• Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life. (p30)
• One could never pay too high a price for any sensation. (p56)
• All that [experience] really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times, and with joy. (p58)
• When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self. Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life – that is the important thing. (p76)
• We are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that 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. (p76)
• There is a fatality about good resolutions – they are always made too late. (p97)
• The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty. (p195)

The passing of time

• Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. (p24)
• [Lord Henry] was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. (p45)
• Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our senses of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us. (p98)
• The one charm of the past is that it is the past. (p99)
• I like men who have a future, and women who have a past. (p172)

Art

• Romantic Art begins with its climax. (p190)
• Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. […] The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. (p208)

Society

• There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. (p6)
• (Said by Basil): With an evening coat and a white tie, […] anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. (p9)
• Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one. (p11)
• If one puts forward an idea to a true Englishman – always a rash thing to do – he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself. (p12)
• Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. (p47)
• A grand passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes of a country. (p49)
• The longer I live, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. (p50)
• In London people are so prejudice. Here, one should never make one’s début with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age. (p95)
• We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. (p101)
• When [our countrymen] make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy. (p187)
• [All good reputations are made out of nothing], every effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be a mediocrity. (p188)
• The British public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months. (p202)
• Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations. (p203)

Women

• Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not. (p16)
• Always! That is a dreadful word. […] Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever. (p26)
• American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past. (p36)
• No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. (p47)
• Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals. (p48)
• There are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. (p48)
• At what particular point did you mention the word marriage, Dorian? […] Women are wonderfully practical. […] In situations of that kind we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always remind us. (p74-75)
• I have a theory that it is always the women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the woman. Except, of course, in middle-class life. But then the middle classes are not modern. (p75)
• Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as Humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them. (p77)
• Women, as some witty Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out. (p77)
• (Said by Dorian): Women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes. (p89)
• The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life. (p97)
• When a woman finds out [that her husband is absolutely indifferent to her], she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman’s husband has to pay for. (p97)
• That awful memory of a woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. (p98)
• Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means they have a history. (p99)
• There is really no end to the consolations that women find in modern life […] the most important one [is] taking some one else’s admirer when one loses one’s own. In good society that always whitewashes a woman. (p99)
• The one charm of the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen. […] If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce. (p99)
• I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated. (p100)
• (His definition of women as a sex): Sphynxes without secrets. (p190)
• How fond women are of doing dangerous things! It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on. (p195)

Marriage

• The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. (p8)
• Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair […] they are so sentimental. (p47)
• Never marry at all. Men marry because they are tiered; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed. (p47)
• The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They become more highly organised, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man’s existence. (p72)
• Every experience is of value, and, whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience. (p72)
• As for marriage […] there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women. (p73)
• One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. (p97)
• When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs. (p170)
• Married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are an essential part of one’s personality. (p202)

Love

• Love is purely a question of physiology. It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say. (p31)
• People who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect – simply a confession of failure. (p49)
• When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. (p52)
• Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them they will forgive us everything. (p171)
• A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her. (p171)
• Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. (p188)
• All ways end at the same point. Disillusion. (p196-197)

Youth

• Youth is the one thing worth having. (p24)
• You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you. (p24)
• To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies. (p42)
• The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. (p83)
• Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. […] Life has revealed to them her latest wonder. (p206)
• The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. (p206)

Concepts

• Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. (p10)
• Genius lasts longer than Beauty. (p15)
• Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. (p24)
• People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity. (p55)
• Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. […] They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account. (p97)
• (Said by Dorian): If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things. (p104)
• Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast. (p172)
• To define is to limit. (p187)

The ugly

• I can sympathise with everything, except suffering. […] It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. […] One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better. (p41)
• (Said by Dorian) I never talk during music – at least, during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation. (p46)
• There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies. (p53)
• 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. (p186)
• Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues. […] Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is. (p186)
• All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. (p203)

Fascination, Pleasure, and Beauty

• Real beauty ends where an intellectual expression begins. (p6)
• Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. (p24)
• A cigarette is the perfect type of perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. (p77)
• There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating – people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. (p83)
• Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful. (p196)

Higher entities

• Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. (p23)
• What the gods give they quickly take away. (p24)
• Scepticism is the beginning of Faith. (p187)
• There is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that. (p194)
• Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. […] One can survive everything nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. (p202)

Typecasting people

• People like you – the wilful sunbeams of life – don’t commit crimes, Dorian. (p51)
• The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. (p56)
• (Said by Basil): Every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always began by saying [I don’t want to preach to you], and then proceeded to break his word. (p145)
• [Basil] never forgave you. It’s a habit bores have. (p204)
• I always contradict the aged. I do it on principle. If you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in 1820. (p206)

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