Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Penguin Classics, 2014.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Robert Mighall. Penguin Classics, 2003, ch. 20.

Horace. "Odes." The Complete Odes and Epodes, translated by David West. Oxford University Press, 2008, bk, 3, no. 30.

Chekhov, Anton. "To Alexi Peshkov (Gorky), 3 January 1899, Yalta." A Life in Letters, translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips. Penguin Classics, 2004.