Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name of common sense.
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.
I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul?
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. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the ...
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest for...
Perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place.
in every pleasure, cruelty has its place...
His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences; yet it was not a simple but rather a very complex passion.
I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
But we never get back our youth… The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exqui...
Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
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. It has been said that the...
Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired, women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. 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. The thoroughly well-informed man - ...
