De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

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

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

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.

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. Nor

‘Tristi fummo Nell aer dolce che dal sol s’allegra.’

‘Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow,— He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.’

now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is

capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.

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.

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. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.

For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When

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. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

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.

he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself,

‘Whatever happens to oneself happens to another.’

it—says somewhere that Christ’s great achievement was that he made himself as much loved after his death as he had been during his lifetime.

And certainly, if his place is among the poets, he is the leader of all the lovers. He saw that love was the first secret of the world for which the wise men had been looking, and that it was only through love that one could approach either the heart of the leper or the feet of God.

Humility, like the artistic, acceptance of all experiences, is merely a m...

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.

Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.

love is more beautiful than hate.

painter make the world a mirror for his moods,

But while Christ did not say to men, ‘Live for others,’ he pointed out that there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one’s own life.

‘O Seigneur, donnez moi la force et le courage De contempler mon corps et mon coeur sans dégoût.’

To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all.

work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. 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.

He saw that people should not be too serious over material, common interests: that to be unpractical

brought him one, taken in the very act of sin and showed him her

He knew that in the soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea.

But he could not stand stupid people, especially those who are made stupid by education: people who are full of opinions not one of which they even understand, a peculiarly modern type, summed up by Christ when he describes it as the type of one who has the key of knowledge, cannot use it himself, and does not allow other people to use it, though it may be made to open the gate of God’s Kingdom.

He treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He would not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals. He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies.

he preached the enormous importance of living completely for the moment.

Those whom he saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful moments in their lives.

All that Christ says to us by the way of a little warning is that every moment should be beautiful, that the soul should always be ready for the coming of the bridegroom, always waiting for the voice of the lover,

He sees all the lovely influences of life as modes of light: the imagination itself is the world of light. The world is made by it, and yet the world cannot understand it: that is because the imagination is simply a manifestation of love, and it is love and the capacity for it that distinguishes one human being from another.

The world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man.

sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection.

is—all great ideas are dangerous.

great ideas are da...

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.

A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.

Those who want a mask have to wear it.

to know oneself: that is the first achievement of knowledge. But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom.

St. Francis of Assisi calls ‘my brother the wind, and my sister the rain,’

God made the world just as much for me as for any one else.

But while to propose to be a better man is a piece of unscientific cant, to have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.

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

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