"Nowadays people know the price of everything
and the value of nothing."
"'what does it profit a man
if he gain the whole world and lose'-
how does the quotation run?-'his own soul'?"
"There were moments
when he looked on evil simply
as a mode through which he could realise
his conception of the beautiful."
"But beauty, real beauty,
ends where an intellectual expression begins.
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration,
and destroys the harmony of any face."
"The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.
They can sit at their ease and gape at the play."
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing
for the things it has forbidden to itself,
with desire for what its monstrous laws have made
monstrous and unlawful."
"My dear boy,
no woman is a genius.
Women are a decorative sex.
They never have anything to say,
but they say it charmingly.
Women represent the triumph of matter over mind,
just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals."
"He was a hero to his valet,
who bullied him, and a terror to most of his relations,
whom he bullied in turn.
Only England could have produced him,
and he always said that the country was going to the dogs.
His principles were out of date,
but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices."
"She behaves as if she was beautiful.
Most American women do.
It is the secret of their charm."
"Young men want to be faithful, and are not;
old men want to be faithless, and cannot."
so said Oscar Wilde in his the Picture of Dorian Gray
.
