“Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does
not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His
virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins,
are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a
part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is
self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly—that is what each of
us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have
forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's
self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe
the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone
out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society,
which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of
religion—these are the two things that govern us.
And yet, I believe
that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to
give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to
every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of
joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to
the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal,
it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The
mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that
mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we
strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins
once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.
Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury
of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has
forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made
monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the
world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only,
that the great sins of the world take place also.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray
