De Profundis Quotes

“When the man’s punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe’s lines—written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy, also:—
‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,—
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. It was not the basis of his creed. When he says, ‘Forgive your enemies,’ it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one’s own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Endless repetition, in and out of season, has spoiled for us the freshness, the naïveté, the simple romantic charm of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far too badly, and all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one returns to the Greek; it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some, narrow and dark house.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I have a right to share in sorrow, and he who can look at the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realise something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God’s secret as any one can get.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful moments in their lives.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity’s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“To reject one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul. For just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lips, the eye: so the Soul, in its turn, has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought, and passions of high import, what in itself is base, cruel, and degrading: nay more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The basis of character is will-power”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“My habit – due to indifference chiefly at first – of giving up to you in everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature. Without my knowing it, it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal mood. That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his essays, Pater says that ‘Failure is to form habits.’ When he said it the dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it. I had allowed you to sap my strength of character, and to me the formation of a habit had proved to be not Failure merely but Ruin. Ethically you had been even still more destructive to me than you had been artistically.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

Along with these things, I had things that were different. I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops. I ceased to be Lord over myself. I was no longer the Captain of my Soul, and did not know it. I allowed you to dominate me, and your father to frighten me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute Humility: just as there is only one thing for you, absolute Humility also. You had better come down into the dust and learn it beside me.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age that in my perversity, and for that perversity’s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good. What is said, however, by myself or by others matters little. The important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to do, or be for the brief remainder of my days one maimed, marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance. The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“ut with the dynamic forces of life, and those in whom those dynamic forces become incarnate, it is different. People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going. They can’t know. In one sense of the word it is, of course, necessary, as the Greek oracle said, to know oneself. That is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son of Kish went out to look for his father’s asses, he did not know that a man of God was waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his own soul was already the Soul of a King.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“And the curious thing to me is that you should have tried to imitate your father in his chief characteristics. I cannot understand why he was to you an exemplar, where he should have been a warning, except that whenever there is hatred between two people there is bond or brotherhood of some kind. I suppose that, by some strange law of the antipathy of similars, you loathed each other, not because in so many points you were so different, but because in some you were so like.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Nobody can shift their responsibilities on anyone else. They always return ultimately to the proper owner.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Suffering - as curious as this may seem to you - is the object for which we exist, since it is the only thing that allows us to know that we live, and the memory of our past feelings is necessary for us, as a guarantee and demonstration of our permanent identity.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“El verdadero necio, ése del que los dioses se ríen o al que arruinan, es el que no se conoce a sí mismo.”
― Oscar Wilde, De profundis (Biblioteca Oscar Wilde)

“Tú admirabas mi obra cuando la veías acabada; gozabas con los éxitos brillantes de mi estreno, y los banquetes brillantes que los seguían; te enorgullecías, y era muy natural, de ser el amigo íntimo de un artista tan distinguido; pero no podías entender las condiciones que exige la producción de la obra artística.”
― Oscar Wilde, De profundis (Biblioteca Oscar Wilde)

“Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. And the first thing that I have got to do is to free myself from any possible bitterness of feeling against the world.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“one realises one’s soul only by getting rid of all alien passions, all acquired culture, and all external possessions, be they good or evil.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“When one comes in contact with the soul it makes one simple as a child, as Christ said one should be.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Te había permitido enterrar la energía de mi carácter, y se había manifestado en mí la adopción de una costumbre, no sólo en forma de muerte, sino casi como de aniquilamiento.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Puede llegar a ser nuestro momento más hermoso, un instante de irracionalidad. Producto son, nuestras equivocaciones, de la lógica que rige al hombre.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“En mi propio interés ya no me restaba otra cosa que hacer más que amarte. Sabía que si me permitía odiarte en el páramo de la existencia a través del cual habría de andar, y por el cual sigo andando aún, perderían su sombra todas las peñas, se secarían todas las palmeras y aparecerían emponzoñados todos los manantiales.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Bacon, dice: Toda belleza tiene alguna desproporción; dice Cristo, de los que gocen de la inteligencia, o sea de los que, como Él, son fuerzas dinámicas, y que se asemejan al viento, que sopla donde se le antoja, pero sin que sepa nadie de dónde viene ni adónde va.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“¿acaso no es como dije ya, la verdad en el arte, la expresión exterior de lo interior, en que se hace carne el alma y está en el cuerpo inanimado por el espíritu, aquello que se proyecta en la forma?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis