The Only Way To Get Rid

Spoken by Lord Henry Wotton in Chapter 2 of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), as he delivers a passionate speech on hedonism to the young Dorian. The full passage continues: "Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself." Lord Henry's philosophy of yielding to desire is the ideological engine of the novel's plot — Dorian takes the advice to heart, with catastrophic results. The line is a deliberate inversion of conventional Victorian moral teaching.