Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realize what it has done. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
Nature…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
Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of man are very different. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
All the spring may be hidden in the single bud, and the low ground nest of the lark may hold the joy that is to herald the feet of many rose-red dawns. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity`s sake, I turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life to good. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
All trials are trials of one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
Of course, once I had put into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said, ‘Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised to the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to.’ The result is that I am in gaol. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
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
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis