De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.

It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us.

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I

anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb.

and that if ever I lie in the cool grass at night-time it will be to write sonnets to the moon.

so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books; and what joy can be greater?

can. 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.

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.

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. One discerns things one never discerned before. One approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.

Behind Sorrow there is only sorrow

Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit.

At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

For the artistic life is simply self-development.

Christ’s place indeed is with the poets.

Oscar Wilde, the man you are

Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

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.

But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals. A pedestal may be a very unreal thing.

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.