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

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Popular quotes

“I'm afraid, Belle, that being a lady is more than proper clothes. It is an attitude. From your...experience, you may know more of business and politics than ladies are supposed to know. Gentlemen are pleased to think ladies are ornamental, and it is an ill-advised ornament who contradicts her gentleman.”
― Donald McCaig, quote from Rhett Butler's People

“John Brooks.’ Immediately, I thought of the odds. First of just surviving in such a place, next of surviving and then becoming a cop. ‘Vertical ghettos, each one of them. Me and John used to say it was the only time when you had to take the elevator up when you were going to hell.’ I just nodded. This was out of my realm completely. ‘And that’s only if the elevators were working,’ he added. I realized that I never considered that Brooks might be a black man. There was no photo in the computer printouts and no reason to mention race in the stories. I had just assumed he was white and it was an assumption I would have to analyze later. At the moment, I was trying to figure out what Washington was trying to tell me by taking me here. Washington pulled into a lot next to one of the buildings. There were a couple of dumpsters coated with decades of graffiti slogans. There was a rusted basketball backboard but the rim was long gone. He put the car in park but left it running. I didn’t know if that was to keep the heat flowing or to allow us a quick getaway if needed. I saw a small group of teenagers in long coats, their faces as dark as the sky, scurry from the building closest to us, then cross a frozen courtyard and hustle into one of the other buildings. ‘At this point you’re wondering what the hell you’re doing here,’ Washington said then. ‘That’s okay, I understand. A white boy like you.’ Again I said nothing. I was letting him run out his line. ‘See that one, third on the right. That was our building. I was on fourteen with my grand-auntie and John lived with his mother on twelve, one below us. They didn’t have no thirteen, already enough bad luck ’round here. Neither of us had fathers. At least ones that showed up.’ I thought he wanted me to say something but I didn’t know what. I had no earthly idea what kind of struggle the two friends must have had to make it out of the tombstone of a building he had pointed at. I remained mute. ‘We were friends for life. Hell, he ended up marrying my first girlfriend, Edna. Then on the department, after we both made homicide and trained with senior detectives for a few years, we asked to be partnered. And damn, it got approved. Story about us in the”
― Michael Connelly, quote from The Poet

“The feeling inside that she experienced when she saw the books was akin to the hunger she felt as food was put on the table at the end of the working day. And she knew that she needed this sustenance as surely as her body needed its fuel.”
― Jacqueline Winspear, quote from Maisie Dobbs

“You have to learn to look at someone you truly adore through eyes that really aren´t your own. It´s as if a person has to become another person altogether to be able to take a hard look. Good people protect people they love, even if that means pretending that everything is okay.”
― Ron McLarty, quote from The Memory of Running

“Luckily, he had the memory span of a particularly dim goldfish, so with any luck he’d have forgotten all about the comment by the time they’d completed their mission.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from The Wish List

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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.