It's a good story, a great story of vanity, moral decline, debauchery, sin and final retribution which even some 130 years after its publication contains some very relevant messages and sentiments.
I am referring to The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde.
There has been a good dramatisation of it re-broadcast on the radio this week and I have found myself compelled out of morbid fascination and anxiety to listen to it and absorb the wonderful quotes that Wilde throws into the general dialogue in his usual throwaway manner.
Some are very familiar having been immersed into popular language and culture and others less so although are still very thought provoking and soul searching. Here is a small collection of quotes in no particular order or preference.
Experience is merely the name men give to their mistakes
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about
Behind every exquisite thing that existed there was something tragic
Some things are more precious because they don't last long
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a relationship and it is by far the best ending for one
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing it is always from the noblest motives
The basis of optimism is sheer terror
All art is quite useless
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face, it cannot be concealed
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world
Women love us for our defects. if we have enough of them they will forgive us everything...
You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know
The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold and bartered away
Never marry a woman with straw coloured hair because they are so sentimental
I never approve or disapprove of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life
People die of common sense.
Genius lasts longer than beauty
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise and that thinks too much to be beautiful
It is a sad truth but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things
One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner
Never trust a woman who wears mauve
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.
I like men who have a future and women who have a past
If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different
Young people nowadays imagine that money is everything
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