De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has.

Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself.

I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.

dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at,

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.

remember during my first term at Oxford reading in Pater’s Renaissance—that book which has had such strange influence over my life—how Dante places low in the Inferno those who wilfully live in sadness; and going to the college library and turning to the passage in the Divine Comedy where beneath the dreary marsh lie those who were ‘sullen in the sweet

air,’ saying for ever and ever through their sighs—

to wear gloom as a king wears purple:

Goethe’s

‘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.’

For prison life with its endless privations and restrictions makes one rebellious.

One sometimes feels that it is only with a front of brass and a lip of scorn that one can get through the day at all.

I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine.

In his own entreaty to the young man, ‘Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor,’ it is not of the state of the poor that he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that wealth was marring.

a guisa di fanciulla che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia.

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 looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man.

He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies.

all great ideas are dangerous.

taken poverty as his bride:

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

Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.

our very dress makes us grotesque.

We are clowns whose hearts are broken.

But it is a very unimaginative nature that only cares for people on their pedestals.

All the spring may be hidden in the single bud,

They are what modern life has contributed to the antique ideal of friendship.

have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things.