De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde

Suffering is one very long moment.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has unsealed for me all the wells of pity:

They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is ‘in trouble’ simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different.

I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy.

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

I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on.

I allowed pleasure to dominate me.

I am far more of an individualist than I ever was.

Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws,

The supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realised is right.

It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind.

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.

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.

Nor could I understand how Dante, who says that ‘sorrow remarries us to God,’ could have been so harsh to those who were enamoured of melancholy, if any such there really were.

to wear gloom as a king wears purple:

I long to live so that I can explore what is no less than a new world to me. Do you want to know what this new world is? I think you can guess what it is. It is the world in which I have been living. Sorrow, then, and all that it teaches one, is my new world.

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.

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.

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.

The most terrible thing about it is not that it breaks one’s heart—hearts are made to be broken—but that it turns one’s heart to stone.

There was no pleasure I did not experience.

I lived on honeycomb.

note of doom that like a purple thread runs through the texture of Dorian Gray; in The Critic as Artist it is set forth in many colours;

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 realised in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the rich.

Some one wrote to me in trouble, ‘When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.’

civil justice calling for water in the vain hope of cleansing himself of that stain of innocent blood that makes him the scarlet figure of history;

Christ is the most supreme of individualists. Humility, like the artistic, acceptance of all experiences,

In many ways I had been its enemy, but I found it waiting for me as a friend.

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.

love is more beautiful than hate.

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.

Every single work of art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every 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.

‘In all beauty,’ says Bacon, ‘there is some strangeness of proportion,’ and of those who are born of the spirit—of those, that is to say, who like himself are dynamic forces—Christ

He has all the colour elements of life: mystery, strangeness, pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love.

It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live. If any love is shown us we should recognise that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved.

His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be.

Christ mocked at the ‘whited sepulchre’ of respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever.

To us, what is termed orthodoxy is merely a facile unintelligent acquiescence; but to them, and in their hands, it was a terrible and paralysing tyranny. Christ swept it aside.

Philistinism being simply that side of man’s nature that is not illumined by the imagination.

They often say in their Gnomic aphorisms, ‘Even the Gods cannot alter the past.’ Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do.

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.

People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going.

But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable, is the ultimate achievement of wisdom. The final mystery is oneself.

But there is nothing in the world so wrong but that the spirit of humanity, which is the spirit of love, the spirit of the Christ who is not in churches, may make it, if not right, at least possible to be borne without too much bitterness of heart.

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. And such I think I have become.