Lord Henry Wotton Quotes

“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.”

“Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.”

“People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”

“Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism -- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.”

“I know, now, that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”

“One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.”

“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”

“You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

“Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. He came close to him and put his hand upon his shoulder. ‘You are quite right to do that,’ he murmured. ‘Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.‘”

“I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.”

“Yes, 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.”

“Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do.”

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

“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.”

“Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.”

What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away.

It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

“Harry,” said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

“Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, he more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.”

“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.”

He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.

They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self.

“They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.”

“The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.

“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.

“Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”

“Harry, I can’t quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work I have ever done, and I will destroy it. What is it but canvas and colour? I will not let it come across our three lives and mar them.”

“American girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women are at concealing their past,”

“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.”

“There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life.”

“To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”

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

You filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life.

A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.

But an actress! Harry! why didn’t you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an actress?”

“Yes, Harry, I believe that is true. I cannot help telling you things. You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime, I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me.”

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

“Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense.”

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

“I hope the girl is good, Harry. I don’t want to see Dorian tied to some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his intellect.”

We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices.

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. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets.”

“As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.”

“Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about,”

“One can use them in fiction, of course. But then the only things that 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.”

“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”

“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

“One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.”

“To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.”

“You were far too happy. 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.”

“Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.”

“How can you say that? I admit that I think that 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.”

“To be popular one must be a mediocrity.”

“Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.”

Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion.

“We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”

“As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.”

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

“All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder. ”

“One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.

“Besides, Dorian, don’t deceive yourself. 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.”

“You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be.”