De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.

It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart.

Her death was terrible to me; but I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.

What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.

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

Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both.

Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering.

Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all.

The external things of life seem to me now of no importance at all.

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?

And I really shall have no difficulty. When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.

When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe:

There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.

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,

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.

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.

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.

Then I must learn how to be happy.

It was always springtime once in my heart.

and I made up my mind to live, but to wear gloom as a king wears purple: never to smile again: to turn whatever house I entered into a house of mourning: to make my friends walk slowly in sadness with me: to teach them that melancholy is the true secret of life: to maim them with an alien sorrow: to mar them with my own pain.

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.

But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.

There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

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.

and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love,

And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived.

At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.

But the sympathy of the artistic temperament is necessarily with what has found expression.

said in Dorian Gray that the great sins of the world take place in the brain: but it is in the brain that everything takes place.

Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.

‘What an ending, what an appalling ending!’ now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely say, ‘What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!’ It may really be so. It may become so.

I can be perfectly happy by myself. With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?

I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work,

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.

For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time. That is not such a tragic thing as possibly it sounds to you.

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.

I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

‘Enfant de mon siècle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely.

and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose.