My favorite passages from The Picture of Dorian Gray

It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow...
And how charming  he had been at dinner the night before, as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face.Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin.He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow...There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence.No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was a real joy in that - perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age so grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims...


'....I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.'
Lord Henry smiled."People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.It is what I call the depth of generosity.'
'Oh, Basil is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit of a Philistine. Since I have known you, Harry, I have discovered that.'
'Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior ones are absolutely fascinating.The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.'