Home > Work > De Profundis

De Profundis QUOTES

De Profundis QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

2 " 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. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

3 " Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

4 " The world loves the Saint, and Christ loves the sinner. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

5 " The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul? "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

6 " Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

7 " It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

8 " It was always once springtime in my heart. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

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

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

10 " In the strangely simple economy of the world people only get what they give, and to those who have not enough imagination to penetrate the mere outward of things and feel pity, what pity can be given save that of scorn? "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

11 " Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

12 " Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

13 " Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

14 " Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that one should live. If any love is shown us we should recognize that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved... or if that phrase is a bitter one to bear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling.. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

15 " I don’t regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure.
I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

16 " My gods dwell in temples made with hands. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

17 " Hearts are made to be broken. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

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

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

19 " 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. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis

20 " 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. "

― Oscar Wilde , De Profundis