De Profundis Quotes

“It was always once springtime in my heart.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any
rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful
books; and what joy can be greater?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“If after I am free a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“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

“Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I tremble with pleasure when I
think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and
the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss
the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“God made the world just as much for me as for any one else.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Even if I had not been waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at.

My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.

When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine.

Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.

But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form.

If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never come to me.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The great things of life are what they seem to be, and for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, are often difficult to interpret. But the little things of life are symbols. We receive our bitter lessons most easily through them.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Society takes upon itself the right to inflict
appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of
shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. 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. It is really ashamed
of its own actions, and shuns those whom it has punished, as people shun a
creditor whose debt they cannot pay, or one on whom they have inflicted
an irreparable, an irremediable wrong.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's college friends. They have been his companions. They bring with them memories of pleasant days together. At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament. The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him. He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act. He has the nature of the poet, and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect, with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much. He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly. Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will, but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness. In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay. He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory. He makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but 'words, words, words.' Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy. He disbelieves in everything, including himself, and yet his doubt helps him not, as it comes not from scepticism but from a divided will.

Of all this Guildenstern and Rosencrantz realise nothing. They bow and smirk and smile, and what the one says the other echoes with sickliest intonation. When, at last, by means of the play within the play, and the puppets in their dalliance, Hamlet 'catches the conscience' of the King, and drives the wretched man in terror from his throne, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz see no more in his conduct than a rather painful breach of Court etiquette. That is as far as they can attain to in 'the contemplation of the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions.' They are close to his very secret and know nothing of it. Nor would there be any use in telling them. They are the little cups that can hold so much and no more.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that one should live. If any love is shown us we should recognize that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved... or if that phrase is a bitter one to bear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling..”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

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

“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.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I forgot that little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has someday to cry aloud on the housetops.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Of course, I should have got rid of you. I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis