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"When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. 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"

"Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin?"

Life is not governed by will or intention.Life is a question of nerves,and fibres,and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.You may fancy yourself safe,and think yourself strong.But..a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings strange memories with it,a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again...it is on things like these that our lives depend

"Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people whose opinions I listen to now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her last wonder."

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, & gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. But this was not one of them. It was... to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself.

"There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful."

"...it seemed ...that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life... as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvelous and evil so full of wonder. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own."

"He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead."

"For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays charming. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities."

"On his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other times, with that pride of rebellion that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling, with secret pleasure, at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own."

"Summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame, but he was unchanged. No winter marred his face or stained his flower-like bloom."

"If we know that a human being is a rational animal, and that an animal consists of a body and a sensitive soul, but do not know what that soul is, nor yet that body, we cannot have a perfect understanding of the human being; for the perfect understanding of anything must take into account its basic elements..." - book 2, section x

this is the second time he's mentioned how even numbers are inferior to odd ones, he's literally so funny

"Let them lay such presumption aside; and, if nature or their own incompetence has made them geese, let them not try to emulate the star-seeking eagle." - book 2, section IV

"And since language is nothing other than the vehicle indispensable to our thinking, as a horse is to a knight, and since the best horses are suited to the best knights, as I said, the best language is suited to the best thinking." - book 2, section I

"...He felt a curious delight in the thought that Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices."

"But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail."

"For what the Romans speak is not so much a vernacular as a vile jargon, the ugliest of all the languages spoken in Italy; and this should come as no surprise, for they also stand out among all Italians for the ugliness of their manners and their outward appearance." -book 1, section XI

why is he giving medieval regina george

"Alas, how it shames me now to recall the dishonouring of the human race! But since I can make no progress without passing that way, though a blush comes to my cheek and my spirit recoils, I shall make haste to do so. Oh human nature, always inclined towards sin! Engaged in evil from the beginning, and never changing your ways!" - Book 1, Section VII

he's literally so dramatic, sassy man epidemic fr

"Yet, in so doing, I shall not bring to so large a cup only the water of my own thinking, but shall add to it more potent ingredients, taken or extracted from elsewhere, so that from these I may concoct the sweetest possible mead." -Book 1

"Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. 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 re-fashioned anew for our pleasure in the darkness..."

"There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself...

"He would examine with minute care, and often with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age."

"What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. They would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive."

"It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time... I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly. I was jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you." GAY.

"Her death has all the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty."

"It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."