De Profundis Quotes

“It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker-on.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“He is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind mechanical forces of Society, and who does not recognise the dynamic force when he meets it either in a man or a movement.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“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

“Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is none.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“El vicio supremo es la superficialidad.”
― 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

“He felt that life was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped into any form was death. He saw that people should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to be unpractical was to be a great thing: that one should not bother too much over affairs. The birds didn’t, why should man?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“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.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I am dazed with a dull sense of pain. I had fed on hope, and now anguish, grown hungry, feeds her fill on me as though she had been starved of her proper appetite.”
― 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.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

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

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

“Indeed, that is the charm about Christ, when all is said: he is
just like a work of art. He does not really teach one anything,
but by being brought into his presence one becomes something. And
everybody is predestined to his presence. Once at least in his
life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus.”
― Wilde Oscar, De Profundis

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

“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

“So perhaps whatever beauty of life still remains to me is contained in some moment of surrender, abasement and humiliation.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the use of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the earth is mother to us all.”
― 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

“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

“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

“We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“I can, at any rate, merely proceed on the lines of my own development, and by accepting all that has happened to me make myself worthy of it.”
― 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