The Picture of Dorian Gray’s Most Quoted Lines, and What They Actually Mean
Read in the room where they are spoken, the book’s best epigrams stop sounding like advice and start sounding like a pitch.
All three sentences get reprinted as wisdom, on posters and quotation cards and in collections of Wilde’s epigrams, with no indication that two of them are spoken by a man who is in the middle of talking somebody into something. Put them back in the room where they are said and the shape of the afternoon changes. That room is also where the playable Picture of Dorian Gray opens, in Basil Hallward’s studio with the finished canvas still on its easel.
🗣️ “Worse than being talked about” is a sales pitch
The line arrives on the first page of Chapter I, in the middle of an argument about whether a painting should be exhibited at all. Basil Hallward has just told Lord Henry that he will not send the portrait anywhere, and Lord Henry, who wants it shown, produces the sentence as his closing argument for putting a private thing in public.
“It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
Basil’s reason for refusing is given one line later and is the opposite of vanity: “I have put too much of myself into it” (l.22). So the exchange sets a painter who is frightened of being read through his own work against a talker who treats exposure as a career move, and the sentence that survives into general circulation is the talker’s. It is worth noticing how often it gets quoted as Wilde’s own view of publicity. In the scene it is a character’s argument for overruling a friend who has just said no.
🍷 The temptation line is aimed at a specific person
The second quotation sits in Chapter II, inside the long speech Lord Henry makes with Dorian standing in front of him for the first time. The speech is a whole philosophy delivered at speed, and the famous sentence is one clause of it, wedged between an argument about self-denial and a claim about where sin actually happens.
“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.”
Two details are usually lost when the sentence is lifted out. The first is the audience: Lord Henry is not musing to himself or to a room, he is addressing a twenty-year-old he met twenty minutes earlier, and he finishes the same speech by naming that young man directly, “you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood.” The second is the timing, which the next section takes up, because the speech and the wish happen in the same sitting for the same portrait.
The Artist's Studio is where the playable Picture of Dorian Gray begins: the canvas is unveiled, and the man beside you is already working the argument that ends in the wish. You can let the speech run, or interrupt it. Role-play The Picture of Dorian Gray →
🖼️ “I would give my soul for that” is the only one Dorian says
Dorian’s contribution to the quotation shelf comes at l.169, still in Chapter II, still in the studio, with his eyes on the finished picture. Wilde builds it as a small escalation rather than a single cry: the young man notes that he will age and the painting will not, then offers everything, then narrows everything down to one item.
“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!”
The description he is reacting to is three pages earlier, when Lord Henry first looks at him properly and the narrator supplies the inventory the rest of the novel keeps returning to: “his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair” (l.105). Every screen adaptation has had to decide what to do with that sentence, and none of the major ones has cast it as written, a small and checkable fact about the casting history.
⏱️ The order is the argument
Read as three separate epigrams the lines are clever and unconnected. Read in sequence they are a short causal chain that takes one afternoon, and the chain is what the novel is built on.
- Chapter I, l.21.Lord Henry argues a private painting into public view, over the painter’s explicit refusal.
- Chapter II, l.122. With Dorian in the room, he makes resistance sound like a disease and surrender sound like hygiene.
- Chapter II, l.169. Dorian, looking at the portrait that exists because of the first argument and hearing the second one still, offers his soul.
Whether the man who supplies the first two sentences bears any weight for the third is the oldest argument readers have about this book, and it has a whole essay of its own. What the portrait then does with the wish, and how early it starts doing it, is the subject of another, because the answer turns out to be much earlier than most first-time readers expect.
📜 The Preface line people quote as Wilde’s own
One more sentence from this book circulates as widely as the three above, and it is the only one Wilde signs in his own voice. The Preface to the 1891 edition opens on it, and the whole Preface runs to barely a page before closing on “All art is quite useless” (l.12) over his printed name.
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
That Preface did not exist when the story first appeared. Wilde wrote it for the book edition, after the magazine version had been attacked in the London press, which is why it reads the way a man answers his critics in the only forum still open to him. The standard reference on Wilde’s career dates the book edition to 1891 and describes it as a revised and expanded version of the magazine text, and the publication history behind that expansion is stranger than the Preface lets on. The full 1891 text, twenty chapters and Preface, is free to read at Project Gutenberg, where every line reference on this page can be checked.
Sources
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (Project Gutenberg eBook #174, 1891 book text) — Project Gutenberg
- Oscar Wilde — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Picture of Dorian Gray — Wikipedia
- The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Nicholas Frankel — Harvard University Press
Frequently asked questions
- What does the quote “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it” mean?
- Taken alone it reads as permission. In context it is one clause inside a long persuasion aimed at a single listener who has known the speaker less than an hour, and the famous sentence does not arrive until most of a page has gone by. The line survived into both the 1890 Lippincott's Monthly Magazine text and the 1891 book, which is part of why it circulates so freely: it is quotable precisely because it detaches from the person it was aimed at.
- What is a famous quote from The Picture of Dorian Gray?
- The three in general circulation all come from Chapters I and II, which is unusual for a twenty-chapter novel: two are Lord Henry's and one is Dorian's. They reached their final wording in the revised edition Ward, Lock and Company published in 1891, when Wilde rewrote the thirteen-chapter magazine text into a twenty-chapter book. Almost nothing from the second half of the novel is quoted at anything like the same rate.
- What does it mean to yield temptation?
- In ordinary English, to give in to it. In Lord Henry's use the phrase carries an extra claim ordinary English does not make: that giving in is hygienic, a way of clearing the system, and that refusal is what does the damage. Victorian moral writing argued the exact reverse, which is why the sentence read as provocation rather than advice when it appeared in 1890 and why it caused trouble for the magazine that printed it.
- What did Oscar Wilde say is the best way to resist temptation?
- He never said anything of the kind in his own voice. The sentence attributed to him on the subject is spoken by a character, Lord Henry Wotton, who recommends not resisting at all. Wilde's own recorded position on morals and fiction sits in the Preface, which he wrote for the book edition after the 1890 magazine version had already been attacked in the press rather than before it.
- Who said, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about”?
- Lord Henry Wotton says it in Chapter I, arguing that Basil Hallward should exhibit the portrait rather than keep it private. It is very often reprinted as Wilde's own epigram, and just as often trimmed: the short form that circulates, “the only thing worse than being talked about”, drops the words the novel actually contains. Checking it against the 1891 text is the quickest way to catch the difference.
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