De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

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.

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

for the journey is long, and ‘where I walk there are thorns.’

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at.

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.

I said to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to show that God did not love man,

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.

When he says, ‘Forgive your enemies,’ it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one’s own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate.

every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is.

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

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

Art only begins where Imitation ends,

The little cup that is made to hold so much can hold so much and no more,

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

‘pour qui le monde visible existe.’