Oscar Wilde’s Best Lines From The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Context

Most of the famous Dorian Gray quotes belong to Lord Henry Wotton, and the novel does not take his side. Wilde gives him the best lines and then shows what they do to the young man who believes them. Here are the lines worth knowing, each copied from the 1891 book text and cited to its chapter, with who says it and what happens next.

One note on texts. The Picture of Dorian Gray first appeared on 20 June 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine for July, in thirteen chapters. The book edition from Ward, Lock and Co. followed in 1891 with new chapters and the Preface, according to Stuart Mason’s 1908 compilation Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality. Chapter numbers below are from the twenty-chapter 1891 version, Project Gutenberg #174, unless marked otherwise.

The Preface: Wilde answers his critics

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

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Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), The Preface

The Preface was not in the magazine version. Mason records that it first ran in the Fortnightly Review in March 1891 as a set of aphorisms, after a summer of hostile reviews. So this famous line is a reply to the reviewers, written after the fact, and the Preface ends, as if to settle the matter, with All art is quite useless.

Lord Henry’s best Dorian Gray quotes

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

Lord Henry, chapter 1

The novel’s first epigram, said in Basil Hallward’s studio when the painter refuses to exhibit his portrait of Dorian. It is a joke about reputation, and it lands differently by the end of the book, when Dorian has become a man people whisper about and would give anything not to be.

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.

Basil Hallward, chapter 1

Not every great line is Lord Henry’s. This is Basil’s explanation for hiding the picture: he has, in his words a few lines earlier, “put too much of myself into it”. It is the novel’s real theory of art, and it is the opposite of the Preface’s cool detachment. Basil is the one character who means what he says.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.

Lord Henry, chapter 2

Dorian has just asked whether Lord Henry is really as bad an influence as Basil says. The answer is the start of an influence, delivered in the garden on the afternoon they meet. Wilde makes the irony structural: a speech warning against influence is the thing that corrupts him.

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

Lord Henry, chapter 2

The most quoted line in the book, usually cut off after the first sentence so that it reads as a cheerful excuse. In context it sits inside a long speech about “the terror of society” and the “terror of God”, and the soul grows sick either way. The 1890 magazine text has the same words in its chapter II.

If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!

Dorian Gray, chapter 2

Dorian, looking at the finished portrait after Lord Henry’s speech on youth. Wilde never explains the mechanism. There is no devil and no contract, just a wish said out loud in a painter’s studio, and Lord Henry laughs it off with a joke about Basil’s work. It is the plot of the novel, and nobody in the room takes it seriously.

I can sympathize with everything except suffering

Lord Henry, chapter 3

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At his Aunt Agatha’s lunch, after she mentions the poor of Whitechapel. He adds that suffering is “too ugly, too horrible, too distressing”. It is a perfect dinner-party line and a confession, and Wilde lets the table laugh at it.

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

Lord Henry, chapter 4

He says this as he walks in late, having spent hours haggling over a piece of old brocade in Wardour Street. The man who just bargained for hours is complaining about people who know prices. Few quotation pages mention the brocade, and it is the best part.

Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil

Dorian Gray, chapter 13

Dorian has taken Basil up to the locked schoolroom and shown him what the portrait has become. Basil calls it “the face of a satyr”, Dorian answers that it is the face of his soul, and then says this. Minutes later he kills the only person who ever loved him without wanting something back.

what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose—how does the quotation run?—his own soul

Lord Henry, chapter 19

Late in the novel Lord Henry quotes the Gospel idly, as a thing he heard a street preacher shouting in the park, and cannot quite remember the words. Dorian starts and stares at him. Lord Henry never learns what his friend has done; the epigram-maker ends the book knowing least.

Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

Narrator, chapter 20

The last lines. After all the talk, Wilde ends in the flattest prose in the book, from the point of view of servants who have climbed in through a window. The portrait is young again on the wall. No one makes a remark about it.

What the 1890 critics said, and Wilde’s reply

The magazine version caused a scandal. The Scots Observer review of 5 July 1890, reprinted by Mason, began:

Why go grubbing in muck heaps? The world is fair, and the proportion of healthy-minded men and honest women to those that are foul, fallen or unnatural is great.

The Scots Observer, 5 July 1890, in Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality (1908)

Wilde wrote back on 9 July with the neatest defence of the novel anyone has made:

Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them.

Oscar Wilde, letter to The Scots Observer, 9 July 1890, in Mason (1908)

It is true of the text. The novel names opium dens and ruined reputations but never says what Dorian does to the young men whose names are linked with his. Wilde also toned down the 1891 book. In the 1890 text, chapter VII, Basil confesses he has worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. In 1891, chapter 9, that becomes I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke.

Quick reference

Where to read further

Both versions are free: the 1890 thirteen-chapter text is Gutenberg #4078 and the 1891 book is #174. Reading them side by side is the quickest way to see Wilde revising under pressure. One difference you can check in a minute: Sibyl Vane’s brother James, who stalks Dorian through the later chapters, is not in the 1890 text at all. He arrives with the 1891 additions.

For more fiction that takes painting seriously, see our list of novels about painters. For lines that are odder than Lord Henry’s, try the strangest sentences in classic literature, or the Jane Austen quotes, where the narrator rather than a dandy gets the best lines.

Sources

• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891 text, 20 chapters), Project Gutenberg #174
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 Lippincott’s text, 13 chapters), Project Gutenberg #4078
• Stuart Mason (ed.), Oscar Wilde, Art and Morality: A Defence of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1908), Project Gutenberg #33689
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1913 edition noting first book publication by Ward, Lock & Co. in 1891), Project Gutenberg #26740