De Profundis Quotes

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Hearts are made to be broken.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“To regret 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.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the 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?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

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

“I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine non sum dignus should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Art only begins where Imitation ends.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought—-theZeitgeistof an age that has no soul—-and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure.
I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“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.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Nature....she will hang the night stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send word the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. It would mean that I would always be haunted by an intolerable sense of disgrace, and that those things that are meant for me as much as for anybody else - the beauty of the sun and moon, the pageant of the seasons, the music of daybreak and the silence of great nights, the rain falling through the leaves, or the dew creeping over the grass and making it silver - would all be tainted for me, and lose their healing power, and their power of communicating joy. To regret 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.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

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