“By the way, Dorian, he (Lord Henry) said, after a pause, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose - how does the quotation run? - his own soul? ”

“What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

“What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lost his soul?”

“...Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lies,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations." Thoreau is playing with the biblical question about what it profits a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul. Lose the whole world, get lost in it, and find your soul.”

“Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains—except kill it.”

“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”