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.

Men have gone to heaven for smaller things than that.

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.

Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation.

I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop.

‘Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark And has the nature of infinity.’

nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all.

It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.

Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share.

When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.

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.

Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.

We think in eternity, but we move slowly through time;

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

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. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really greater tragedies than poverty or sorrow.

I 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.

Those who want a mask have to wear it.

With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.