De Profundis Quotes

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

I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.

– Oscar Wilde

Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so.

– Oscar Wilde

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, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

– Oscar Wilde

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.

– Oscar Wilde

I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.

– Oscar Wilde

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

– Oscar Wilde

Only good questions deserve good answers.

– Oscar Wilde

We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour.

– Oscar Wilde

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly muffled glass of the small iron barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always twilight in one’s heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again tomorrow.

– Oscar Wilde

Between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one.

– Oscar Wilde

If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world.

– Oscar Wilde

There is no reason why a man should show his life to the world. The world does not understand things.

– Oscar Wilde

When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.

– Oscar Wilde

I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me…There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.

– Oscar Wilde

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

A man’s very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life.

– Oscar Wilde

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.

– Oscar Wilde

What is said of a man is nothing. The point is, who says it.

– Oscar Wilde

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

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

– Oscar Wilde

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.

– Oscar Wilde