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forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic
Greek ideal, to something finer, richer than the Hellenic
Greek ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage survives, in the has its tragic survival, in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. it. Every impulse that we strangle strive to strangle broods in the
our mind
brain, 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
memory of a pleasure, or the luxury of a secret. 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
what 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
are  . You, Mr. Gray, you yourself with your rose-red youth, and your rose-white boyhood, you have perhaps had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams