Quotes from De Profundis

“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, quote from De Profundis

“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, quote from 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, quote from De Profundis

“When you really want love you will
find it waiting for you.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from 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, quote from De Profundis

“I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“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, quote from De Profundis

“Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“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, quote from De Profundis

“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, quote from De Profundis

“Art only begins where Imitation ends.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“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, quote from De Profundis

“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, quote from De Profundis

“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, quote from De Profundis

“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling, and Domine non sum dignus should be on the lips and in the hearts of those who receive it.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“Nature....she will hang the night stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send word 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, quote from De Profundis

“A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought—-the Zeitgeist of an age that has no soul—-and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“I am completely penniless, and absolutely homeless. Yet there are worse things in the world than that.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any
rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful
books; and what joy can be greater?”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“What the artist is
always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are
one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in
which form reveals.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from 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, quote from De Profundis

“The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

“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, quote from De Profundis

“It was always once springtime in my heart.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from De Profundis

About the author

Popular quotes

“You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from Angle of Repose

“Wait", Butch said, thinking about the glymera. "Marissa's mated now, right? I mean, even if I die, she will have had a mate right?"

"Death wish," V said under his breath. "Fucking Death Wish Boy we got over here."
The Scribe Virgin seemed flat-out amazed "I should kill you now.”
― J.R. Ward, quote from Lover Revealed

“Let go," he advised me, and I loosened my grip on his hands. "No, not of me," he said, smiling. "You can hold on to me as long as you want. Let go of the pain, Sookie. Let go. You need to drift away."
It was the first time I had relinquished my will to someone else. As I looked at him, it became easy, and I retreated from the suffering and uncertainty of this strange place.”
― Charlaine Harris, quote from Club Dead

“Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.”
― Michael Pollan, quote from The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“If you can be still enough and common enough, then it's really easy to be invisible.”
― Ally Carter, quote from I'd Tell You I Love You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.