DE PROFUNDIS
"Remember that the fool in the eyes of the gods and the fool in the eyes of a man are very different. One who is entirely ignorant of the modes of Art in its revolution or the moods of thought in its progress, of the pomp of the Latin line or the richer music of the vowelled Greek, of Tuscan sculpture or Elizabethan song may yet be full of the very sweetest wisdom. The real fool, such as gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was such a one too long"
pg. 4
"It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it"
"Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain."
"I treated Art as the supreme reality,
And life as a mere mode of fiction"
"Those who have much are often greedy.
Those who have little always share"
HATE BLINDS PEOPLE"
(De Profundis, p.31)
"PAIN, UNLIKE PLEASURE, WEARS NO MASK"
"Most people live FOR love and admiration, but it is only BY love and admiration that we should live"
pg.79
"To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life"
"...Nothing should be wasted of what is given to me. So one should look on love"
pg.60
"...And if someone is ashamed of having been punished, one might just as well never have been punished at all"
pg.61
"Whatever happens to another happens to oneself"
"The life of a man is no more than the life of a flower"
"... That is because one only realises one's soul by getting rid of all alien passions, all acquired culture, and all external possessions be they good or evil"
pg.73
"When one comes in contact with the soul it makes one simple as a child, as Christ said one should be. It is tragic how few people ever 'posses their souls' before they die."
pg.73
" 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own'. It's quite true. Most people are another people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
"LOVE IS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN HATE"
"AND IF LIFE BE, AS IT SURELY IS, A PROBLEM TO ME, I AM NO LESS A PROBLEM TO LIFE."
pg.62
"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"
pg. 62
"There is no use in telling a person a thing that they don't feel and can't understand." (p. 35)
"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" (p. 36)
"One of the many lessons that one learns in prison in that things are what they are, and will be what they will be." (p. 43)
"The fatal errors of life are not due to man's being unreasonable: an unreasonable moment may be one's finest moment. They are due to man's being logical. There is a wide difference" (p. 31)
"To be entirely free and at the same time entirely dominated by law is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment"
(De Profundis)
"Suffering (...) is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity."
(De Profundis)
"I said in Dorian Gray that the great sins of the world take place in the brain, but it is in the brain that everything takes place."
pg. 78
"(...) in the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime, when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination"
(De Profundis)
