Oscar Wilde Quotes

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 8. Lord Henry says this to Dorian, after Dorian expresses the view that Sibyl if she had lived would have kept him straight. Henry goes on to say: "If you had married this girl, you would have been wretched. Of course, you would have treated her kindly. One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. And when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman’s husband has to pay for. I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have been abject – which, of course, I would not have allowed – but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an absolute failure." Henry is not a big fan of the institution of marriage, or of women.