Excerpts from The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde:

"At these times I feel, Harry, that I have given my whole soul to someone who treats it like a flower to be put on his coat, a little decoration to please his vanity, an ornament for a summer's day." (p. 19).

"What you've told me comes to be a romance, an artistic romance, so to speak, and the worst thing in a romance of any kind is that it ends our romanticism." (p. 20)

"Because to influence someone is to give them their own soul. One does not think of his natural thoughts, nor does he burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not true. His sins, if there are sins, are borrowed. He becomes the echo of another's music, plays a role that was not written for him. The goal of life is self-development. Let us fulfill our nature with perfection - that is what each of us is here for. Nowadays people are afraid of themselves. They have forgotten the highest of obligations, the obligation which each one owes to himself. Of course, they are charitable. Feed the hungry, dress the beggars. But their own souls starve and are naked. Courage has abandoned our race. Maybe we've never had one. The terror of society, the basis of morality, the fear of God, the secret of religion - are the two things that govern us. And yet..." (p. 26)

"For these treasures and all that he collected in his beautiful home were for him a means of forgetting, ways in which he could escape, for a season, from the fear which at times seemed too great for him to bear. On the walls of the lonely, locked room where he had spent so much of his childhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose mutant features showed him the true degradation of his life, and before him had arranged the shroud as a curtain." (p. 164)

"It is said that passion makes us think in circles. Certainly, in a hideous reiteration, Dorian Gray's bitten lips drew and redrawn the subtle words concerning soul and senses, until he found in them the full expression, so to speak, of his state of mind, and justified by intellectual approval, passions that without such justification would still have dominated his temperament. From one cell to the other of his brain the single thought crawled; and the wild desire to live, more terrible than all human appetites, excited every trembling nerve and fiber. The ugliness that had been an odious day, because it made things real, became for him dear for the same reason. The vulgar quarrel, the detestable lair, the cruel violence of the unruly life, the very vileness of the thief and the excluded, were more vivid in their intense impression of reality than all the graceful forms of Art than the dream shadows of Song. It was what he needed to forget. In three days he would be free." (p. 217)