The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde: life quotes

Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it.

Ah! realise 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....

Don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that one knows that Life has exhausted him.

The life that was to make his soul would mar his body.

Life has been your art.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth.

We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.

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

Human life—that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.

One's own life—that is the important thing.

Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.
But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art; was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, Life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.

But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.

How extraordinarily dramatic life is!

Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing.

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....