Oscar Wilde - De Profundis

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But what is the good of friendship if one cannot say exactly what one means? Anybody can say charming things and try to please and to flatter, but a true friend always says unpleasant things, and does not mind giving pain. Indeed, if he is a really true friend he prefers it, for he knows that then he is doing good.

Oscar Wilde
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.

Oscar Wilde
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

Oscar Wilde
Surely Love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds, and dearer than fine opals. Pearls and pomegranates cannot buy it, nor is it set forth in the marketplace. It may not be purchased of the merchants, for can it be weighed out in the balance for gold.

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

Oscar Wilde
To toil for a hard master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.

Oscar Wilde
Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask.

Oscar Wilde
I would not a bit mind sleeping in the cool grass in summer, and when winter came on sheltering myself by the warm close-thatched rick, or under the penthouse of a great barn, provided I had love in my heart.

Oscar Wilde
We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.

Oscar Wilde
I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.

Oscar Wilde
What men call the shadow of the body is not the shadow of the body, but is the body of the soul.

Oscar Wilde
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.

Oscar Wilde
Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

Oscar Wilde
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.

Oscar Wilde
I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.

Oscar Wilde
The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.

Oscar Wilde
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.

Oscar Wilde
It is only very ugly or very beautiful women who ever hide their faces.

Oscar Wilde
Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.

Oscar Wilde
Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.

Oscar Wilde
Anybody can have common sense, provided that they have no imagination.

Oscar Wilde
Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishment on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself; that is to say, it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.

Oscar Wilde
How strange a thing this is! The Priest telleth me that the Soul is worth all the gold in the world, and the merchants say that it is not worth a clipped piece of silver.

Oscar Wilde
I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.

Oscar Wilde
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.

Oscar Wilde
People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But then, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approach them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.

Oscar Wilde
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
Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.

Oscar Wilde