suffer /// sorrow

“to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. in a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike." -walter pater

all following quotes from de profundis by oscar wilde

"love does not traffic in a market place, 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. . . i knew that if i allowed myself to hate you that in the dry desert of existence over which i had to travel, and am travelling still, every rock would lose its shadow, every palm tree be withered, every well of water prove poisoned at its source. "

"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. the paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces, the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. . . for us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. the very sun and moon seem taken from us. . . it is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. and in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. the thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen again to me tomorrow."

"prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. there is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. the thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. it is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain. . .  where there is sorrow there is holy ground."

"i must say to myself that i ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. i am quite ready to say so. i am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. this pitiless indictment i bring without pity against myself. terrible as was what the world did to me, what i did to myself was far more terrible still."

"the gods had given me almost everything. i had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; i made art a philosophy and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things; there was nothing i said or did that did not make people wonder. i took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or sonnet; at the same time i widened its range and enriched its characterisation. drama, novel, poem in prose, poem in rhyme, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever i touched, i made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself i gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. i treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction. i awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me. i summed up all systems in a phrase and all existence in an epigram. along with these things i had things that were different. but i let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. i amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. i surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. i became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. tired of being on the heights, i deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. what the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. i grew careless of the lives of others. i took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. i forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops. i did not know it. i allowed pleasure to dominate me. i ended in horrible disgrace. there is only one thing for me now, absolute humility."

"as long as i am free from all resentment, hardness, and scorn, i would be able to face the life with much more calm and confidence than i would were my body in purple and fine linen, and the soul within me sick with hate."

"reason does not help me. it tells me that the laws under which i am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which i have suffered a wrong and unjust system. but somehow, i have got to make both of these things just and right to me. and exactly as in art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of one's character. i have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me."

"between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if as much as one."

"a day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy."

"people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. it is really a revelation. one discerns things one never discerned before. one approaches the whole of history from a different standpoint. what one had felt dimly, through instinct, about art, is intellectually and emotionally realised with perfect clearness of vision and absolute intensity of apprehension."

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

"what is true of a bankrupt is true of everyone else in life. for every single thing that is done some one has to pay. even you yourself - with all your desire for absolute freedom from all duties, your insistence on having everything supplied to you by others, your attempts to reject any claim on your affection, or regard, or gratitude - even you will have some day to reflect seriously on what you have done, and try, however unavailingly, to make some attempt at atonement."

"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. . . 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"

"remember also that i have yet to know you. perhaps we have yet to know each other. for yourself, i have but this last thing to say. do not be afraid of the past. if people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not believe them. . . time and space, succession and extension, are merely accidental conditions of thought. . . what lies before me is my past. i have got to make myself look on that with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make god look on it with different eyes. this i cannot do by ignoring it, or slighting it, or praising it, or denying it. it is only to be done fully by accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character: by bowing my head to everything that i have suffered."

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. Walter Pater
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/walterpate297360.html

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. Walter Pater
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/walterpate297360.html

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/walterpate297360.html

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/walterpate297360.html