Friends

"Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre: remorse is the poison of life."

"Repentance is said to be its cure, sir."

"It is not its cure.  Reformation may be its cure; and I could reform- I have strength yet for that--if--but where is the use of thinking of it, hampered, burdened, cursed as I am? Besides, since happiness is irrevocably denied to me, I have a right to get pleasure out of life: and I will get it, cost what it may."

"Why?"

“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his own natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion- these are the two things that govern us. And yet-”

“Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good boy,” said the painter, deep in his work, and conscious only that a look had come into the lad’s face that he had never seen there before.

“And yet,” continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eton days, “I believe that if one an were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream- I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal- to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusal. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us.”

-from the memoirs of the nineteenth century French hermaphrodite, Herculine Barbin

I wanted to know how to have my cake and eat it, how to write just what I pleased and yet get well paid. You see what an important question that may be to a young writer but I cannot answer it. A whole lifetime has not taught me the answer."

"Why is money so hard to come by? There is so much of it about. If you see the man with the superfluous million do remember my name. It may be he is worried about his income tax."

( Many more )

"It happens the world over- we love ourselves more than we do the one we say we love. We all want to be Number One; we've got to be Number One or nothing! We can't see that we could make ourselves loved and needed in the Number Two, or Three, or Four spot. No sir, we've got to be Number One, and if we can't make it, we'll rip and tear at the loved on till we've ruined ever smidgin of love that was ever there."