Quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray

“If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old!”

Dorian's first wish, made in front of the painting, before he knows that wishing has consequences. Wilde sets up the central conceit in a single Romantic outburst. The genius is in the rhythm: Dorian is not seriously asking for a bargain, he is being a beautiful young man complaining about mortality. The novel argues that ordinary vanity, given the chance to become metaphysical, is a kind of bomb.

“Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!”

Lord Henry to Dorian in Basil's studio, ten minutes before Dorian makes his wish. Wilde is deliberate about who speaks first. Dorian's wish is not original; he is repeating Lord Henry's gospel back to him. The novel's moral architecture is here: ideas have authors, and the author of an idea is not innocent of the lives lived under it. Lord Henry is the apostle Dorian becomes a martyr to.

“I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it.”

Dorian, the same scene, working himself toward the wish. The sentence is Wilde's clearest articulation of why beauty matters in the novel: not as ornament but as transaction. Dorian sees himself in the picture as he will be in fifty years, and the seeing produces an unbearable arithmetic. The wish is a refusal to be subject to time, and the novel is what happens when refusal works.

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

Lord Henry's most quoted line. It is a perfectly turned epigram and a piece of moral nonsense; Wilde knows both. The whole novel is in the gap. Dorian takes the line seriously, as a recipe for life. Wilde shows what that recipe costs over twenty chapters. The line is dangerous because it is funny, and funny because it is dangerous, and Wilde will not let either feature cancel the other.

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

Lord Henry to Basil in the studio. The line has had a long second life as a quotation in articles about celebrity, and is usually mistaken for cynical wisdom. Wilde, who would die in disgrace ten years after publication, knew it was not wisdom. He puts it in Lord Henry's mouth as the kind of thing said by people who have never been talked about in a way that would ruin them.

“It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But it is better to be good than to be ugly.”

Lord Henry late in the novel, still spinning paradoxes after Dorian has already killed Basil. The pleasure of Wilde's prose is that the line stays funny even after the reader knows what it has cost. The horror of Wilde's prose is that the line stays funny even after the reader knows what it has cost. The novel is partly an essay on the moral status of a sentence that survives the lives it has wrecked.

“Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him, Basil.”

Dorian to Basil shortly before murdering him. The line is theology delivered as defence. Wilde lets Dorian, at the precise moment he becomes a killer, articulate the dualism the painting has been making visible for years. Heaven and Hell in one person is not a metaphor in the novel; the painting is its evidence. Dorian quotes the doctrine; the painting documents the score.

“It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him.”

Dorian, alone with the painting in the locked room. The novel's most important room. Wilde does not let Dorian be unaware of what is happening to him; the horror is that he sees the painting change and continues anyway. The phrase living death is technical: the soul is not dead, it is being slowly evacuated, and Dorian is the only witness to a kind of suicide spread over a lifetime.

“He felt as if he had been suddenly stripped of his armour.”

Dorian, in the final chapter, the night he will destroy the painting and die. Armour is Wilde's last metaphor for what beauty has done for Dorian: not only made him irresistible but made him invulnerable, until this evening, when an old victim's brother nearly kills him. The armour is the spell. The novel's ending is what happens when the spell stops working for an instant.

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

From the preface Wilde added after the novel's serial publication caused a scandal. The line is famous as Wilde's defence of aestheticism, and is true as far as it goes. It is also a bluff: the novel itself contains the most morally consequential sentence in Wilde's body of work (Sibyl Vane's suicide as the price of Dorian's first cruelty). Wilde defended the book as if it were not the book.

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”

The preface again. The line is a warning to critics, and an alibi for the novelist. Wilde is telling readers: if you find Dorian Gray a moral lesson, that is what you brought. If you find it an aesthetic provocation, that is what you brought. The novel itself, like the painting in it, will show each reader something different, and Wilde refuses to take responsibility for the differences.