"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All
influence is immoral -- immoral from the scientific point of view. 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 cloth
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 it 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 recollections
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."
Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
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