De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings Quotes

“The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“The sea, as Euripides says in one of his plays about Iphigenia, washes away the stains and wounds of the world.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“and life, seeing her own image, was still, and dared not to speak.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines (...) So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress. (...) In no case it represents its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“Ruin followed, like the echo of a bitter cry, or the shadow that hunts with the beast of prey.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalists. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one of its secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never known.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“Open it at that sad madrigal that begins "Que m'importe que tu sois sage? Sois belle! et sois triste" and you will find yourself worshiping sorrow as you never worshiped joy.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“He took them, and shaped them into a song. They become his, because he made them lovely. They were built out of music, and so not built at all, and therefore built for ever.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“Nowadays, we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“and over our heads will float the bluebird singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of lying”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“Cyril: surely you would acknowledge that art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and under whose influence it is produced.
Vivian: Certainly not! art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“If you find in it something of which you feel that you are unjustly accused, remember that one should be thankful that there is any fault of which one can be unjustly accused.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“For Wilde, the most perfect individual is anarchic and antisocial, obeying laws only of his own making. As in "The Critic as an artist", he dismisses action as a lower form of existence than contemplation. "Being" rather than "doing" is the goal towards which man should strive, and the ideal State should facilitate this. "The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is" (Anne Varty's Introduction)”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings

“She told me of your two chief faults, your vanity, and your being, as she termed it, "all wrong about money". I have a distinct recollection of how I laughed. I had no idea that the first would bring me to prison, and the second to bankruptcy.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, The Ballad of Reading Gaol & Other Writings