De Profundis Quotes

“But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals. A pedestal may be a very unreal thing. A pillory is a terrific reality. They should have known also how to interpret sorrow better. I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow. It were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul. And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing. 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

“the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at the harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill anymore than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“най-големите грехове на света се случват в мозъка,но в мозъка се случва всичко... Само и единствено в мозъка макът е червен, ябълката мирише и чучулигата пее.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“Изкуството никога не трябва да се опитва да бъде популярно. Хората трябва да се опитват да бъдат артистични.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings

“If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Entre mí y el recuerdo de pasadas alegrías hay un abismo no menos profundo que entre mí y posibles alegrías actuales.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so. Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also as 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. I can claim on my side that if I realise what I have suffered, society should realise what it has inflicted on me; and that there should be no bitterness or hate on either side.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“El vicio supremo es la superficialidad.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Entonces vi que lo único que había para mí era aceptarlo todo. Desde entonces -por curioso que esto sin duda te resulte- he sido más feliz.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.  The”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Las grandes pasiones son para los grandes de alma, y los grandes hechos sólo los ven los que están a una altura con ellos.”
― 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? Besides, feasts are not for me any more. I have given too many to care about them. That side of life is over for me, very fortunately, I dare say. But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. But that could not be. 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

“One sometime feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“La sublimidad de alma no se contagia. Los altos pensamientos, las altas emociones están aislados por su propia existencia.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Christ pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“No escribo esta carta para poner amargura en tu corazón, sino para arrancarla del mío.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Morala nu mă ajută.Sunt un antinomist înnăscut.Sunt unul dintre acei oamnei făcuţi pentru excepţii,nu pentru reguli.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Lo que tengo ante mí es mi pasado. He de conseguir mirarlo con otros ojos, hacer que el mundo lo mire con otros ojos, hacer que Dios lo mire con otros ojos. Eso no lo puedo conseguir soslayándolo, ni menospreciándolo, ni alabándolo, ni negándolo. Únicamente se puede hacer aceptándolo plenamente como una parte inevitable de la evolución de mi vida y mi carácter: inclinando la cabeza a todo lo que he sufrido.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Remember also that whatever is misery to you to read, is still greater misery to me to set down. To you the Unseen Powers have been very good. They have permitted you to see the strange and tragic shapes of Life as one sees shadows in a crystal. The head of Medusa that turns living men to stone, you have been allowed to look at in a mirror merely. You yourself have walked free among the flowers. From me the beautiful world of colour and motion has been taken away.”
― 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

“Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“What you had to do was quite simple, and quite clear before you, but hate blinded you, and you could see nothing.”
― 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 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

“Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole: by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relation. Only what is fine, and finely conceived, can feed love. But anything will feed hate.”
― 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