"Morality does not help me. 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. It is well to have learned that."
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"Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also."

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"When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man. But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never come to me."

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"I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. I will not say that prison is the best thing that could have happened to me: for that phrase would savour of too great bitterness towards myself. 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."

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"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. 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. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in The Happy Prince, some of it in The Young King, notably in the passage where the bishop says to the kneeling boy, ‘Is not He who made misery wiser than thou art’? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that like a purple thread runs through the texture of Dorian Gray; in The Critic as Artist it is set forth in many colours; in The Soul of Man it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it is one of the refrains whose recurring motifs make Salome so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the ‘Pleasure that liveth for a moment’ has to make the image of the ‘Sorrow that abideth for ever’ it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol."

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"It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

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"Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history. People have tried to make him out an ordinary philanthropist, or ranked him as an altruist with the scientific and sentimental. But he was really neither one nor the other. Pity he has, of course, for the poor, for those who are shut up in prisons, for the lowly, for the wretched; but he has far more pity for the rich, for the hard hedonists, for those who waste their freedom in becoming slaves to things, for those who wear soft raiment and live in kings’ houses. Riches and pleasure seemed to him to be really greater tragedies than poverty or sorrow. And as for altruism, who knew better than he that it is vocation not volition that determines us, and that one cannot gather grapes of thorns or figs from thistles?"

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" Philistinism was the note of the age and community in which he lived. In their heavy inaccessibility to ideas, their dull respectability, their tedious orthodoxy, their worship of vulgar success, their entire preoccupation with the gross materialistic side of life, and their ridiculous estimate of themselves and their importance, the Jews of Jerusalem in Christ’s day were the exact counterpart of the British Philistine of our own. Christ mocked at the ‘whited sepulchre’ of respectability, and fixed that phrase for ever. He treated worldly success as a thing absolutely to be despised. He saw nothing in it at all. He looked on wealth as an encumbrance to a man. He would not hear of life being sacrificed to any system of thought or morals. He pointed out that forms and ceremonies were made for man, not man for forms and ceremonies."

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"We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, and fire purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all. As a consequence our art is of the moon and plays with shadows, while Greek art is of the sun and deals directly with things. I feel sure that in elemental forces there is purification, and I want to go back to them and live in their presence." ( )

This is brilliant and heartbreaking and frustrating as hell.

When it comes to lust Oscar Wilde is no different than every man on Sugardaddy.com. Find a pretty young thing, pay his/her bills, and then become completely undone when s/he turns out to be in it for the supply of cash! Lord Alfred was a terrible man all throughout his life. He loved Hitler and the Klan and wished for both to descend upon England, he lived off others, he was a textbook narcissist. But he wasn't hiding anything. He consistently told Wilde who he was, through actions yes, but also explicitly through words. Wilde's "why did you make me rack up debts and enter into inadvisable legal actions?" shtick would be sad if it wasn't so clear he deserved it. In the last moments of this English gentleman's version of a primal scream Wilde beseeches his sugar baby to explain why he has not visited in prison. He hasn't visited because the gravy train was derailed. And even as he rots in prison Wilde refuses to acknowledge the truth of it. He whines, he analyzes, but never does he say that he is a vain idiot who let a pretty boy destroy his life. Love is not that blind. Lust is that blind. Pride is that blind/ But love? No.

So other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? Well, it was freaking great. Wilde is brilliant, and his writing on the nature of art and self is moving and wise and gorgeous. I spent hours transfixed by Wilde's words, and then I flipped back to page 1 and re-read swaths of the book. I am quite certain I will go back and do it again, eventually. When I reread this, I will wonder anew at how Wilde could so completely fail to lend his prodigious wisdom to his own life. His was, perhaps, a fitting end for an aesthete, but that makes the end no less tragic and makes the loss of Wilde before the age of 50 no less lamentable. ( )

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.

While the circumstances of these pieces were tragic, I wasn't moved as I had anticipated. My recent immersion in Will Self had prompted a fit for literary biography and I thought this could be foundational for an Ellmann or two.

Soul of Man is simply wonky. It is a treatise on Art and Law which doesn't begin to ascribe to reality. We watched Modern Times last night and I thought Wilde's Socialism in that context.

De Profundis conversely is steeped in betrayal and the weakness of the flesh. Wilde probes along, establishing detailed accounts of his troubled relationship-- one which bankrupted him and led to his imprisonment. His love for Bosie Douglas is painted patiently, paragraph by paragraph. Bosie isn't a straw man but a talisman of desire, despite how destructive it proved. Bedding Bosie became an enchanted portrait: the cost of such was but everything. It is interesting reflecting on this how martyrdom becomes an enveloping proposition. ( )

Extremely well-written and interesting. It belongs, admirably, to the canon of Oscar Wilde's works. I was very impressed-- especially with De Profundis. Well worth the read! ( )

Wahou ! J'ai découvert Oscar Wilde avec De profundis, ce qui n’est sûrement pas son oeuvre la plus accessible...mais elle me l'a fait aimé à jamais !
Il est pour moi le meilleur écrivain au monde, et De profundis restera sans doute un des plus beaux (si ce n'est Le plus beau) livre que j'ai pu lire. Il m'a fait un tel effet que j'ai décidé de l'acheter en plusieurs exemplaires pour pouvoir l'offrir aux gens que j'aime et qui aiment la littérature. C'est tout simplement sublimement écrit, et ça n'en n'est que plus bouleversant que c'est une lettre écrite en prison et qui s'adresse à l'homme "à cause" duquel Wilde s'y trouve. Sans compter que cela signe la chute de son auteur qui ne se relèvera jamais de ce séjour. De la littérature magistrale. ( )