Quotes from book

De Profundis

“Only good questions deserve good answers.”

“A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.”

“It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.”

“For a sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

“All trials are trials for one’s life, just as all sentences are sentences of death;”

“I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.”

“We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.”

“The supreme vice is shallowness.”

“sorrow… is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of
love touches it”

“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”

“Art only begins where Imitation ends.”

“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.”

“When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

“Every one is worthy of love, except him who thinks that he is. Love is a
sacrament that should be taken kneeling.”

“I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.”

“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.”