De Profundis Quotes

But no one leaves. - Let us set out once more on our native roads, burdened with my vice, that vice that since the age of reason has driven roots of suffering into my side - that towers to heaven, beats me, hurls me down, drags me on.

Ultimate innocence, final timidity. All's said. Carry no more my loathing and treacheries before the world.

Come on! Marching, burdens, the desert, boredom and anger.

Hire myself to whom? What beasts adore? What sacred images destroy? What hearts shall I break? What lie maintain? - Through what blood wade?

Better to keep away from justice. - A hard life, outright stupor, - with a dried-out fist to lift the coffin lid, lie down, and suffocate. No old age this way, no danger: terror is very un-French.

- Ah! I am so forsaken I will offer at any shrine impulses toward perfection.

Oh my self-denial, my marvelous Charity! my Selfless love! And still here below!

De Profundis Domine, what an ass I am! ~ Arthur Rimbaud

Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill anymore than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. ~ Oscar Wilde

The birds on the branches, the lilies in the field, the deer in the forest, the fishes in the sea, countless hosts of happy men, exultantly proclaim: God is love. But underneath all these sopranos, supporting them as it were, as the bass part does, is audible the de profundis which issues from the sacrificed one: God is love. ~ Walter Lowrie

Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man. ~ Oscar Wilde

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. ~ Oscar Wilde

But if after I am free a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would come back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share in. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode in which disgrace could be inflicted on me. ~ Oscar Wilde

I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. ~ Oscar Wilde

Your life is a trajectory. Every choice you make alters that trajectory, in a positive or negative way. Will you categorize that dinner with friends as a business expense? Will you be honest with your daughter? Will you take more credit than you're due? These are just the small questions that we face every day, and little by little, the answers influence the trajectory of our lives and beings. ~ Donald Van De Mark

My job as a designer is to make a woman feel her very best ~ Oscar De La Renta

Tell me who admires and loves you, and I will tell you who you are. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents. ~ Charles De Lint

Be slow of tongue and quick of eye. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, sweet as love. ~ Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement. ~ Michel De Montaigne

After the age of eighty, all contemporaries are friends. ~ Ninon De L'Enclos

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

To succeed in the world we must look foolish but be wise. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

And finally I begin to have such a success in my examinations that I found myself in a career you see. ~ Victoria De Los Angeles

Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The Frenchman sat up with that strange energy which comes often as the harbinger of death. "( ... ) This I tell you - I, Raoul de la Roche Pierre de Bras, dying upon the field of honour. And now kiss me, sweet friend, and lay me back, for the mists closes round me and I am gone!"
With tender hands the squire [Nigel] lowered his comrade's head, but even as he did so there came a choking rush of blood, and the soul had passed. So died a gallant cavalier of France, and Nigel, as he knelt in the ditch beside him, prayed that his own end might be as noble and as debonair. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Mozart is my first strength. ~ Danielle De Niese

Globalization is a fact of economic life. ~ Carlos Salinas De Gortari

We do not grow by knowing all of the answers, but rather by living with the questions. ~ Max De Pree

A man often imagines that he acts, when he is acted upon. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The leader is the servant who removes the obstacles that prevent people from doing their jobs. ~ Max De Pree

About the other one, which for the moment bears the code name Dedale 39, we know only what Ravel is willing to say about it one day to Manuael De Falla: it was supposed to be an airplane in the key of C. ~ Jean Echenoz

Faith is a devout belief in what one does not understand. ~ Marie Anne De Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise Du Deffand

I have no other passion to keep me in breath. What avarice, ambition, quarrels, law suits do for others who, like me, have no particular vocation, love would much more commodiously do; it would restore to me vigilance, sobriety, grace, and the care of my person; it would reassure my countenance, so that the grimaces of old age, those deformed and dismal looks, might not come to disgrace it; would again put me upon sound and wise studies, by which I might render myself more loved and esteemed, clearing my mind of the despair of itself and of its use, and redintegrating it to itself; would divert me from a thousand troublesome thoughts, a thousand melancholic humours that idleness and the ill posture of our health loads us withal at such an age; would warm again, in dreams at least, the blood that nature is abandoning; would hold up the chin, and a little stretch out the nerves, the vigour and gaiety of life of that poor man who is going full drive towards his ruin. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Men must stop being jealous of their power and generously allow freedom and responsibility to others. The reward is harmonious families and society. ~ Delphine De Girardin

True nobility isn't about being better than anyone else; it's about being better than you used to be. ~ Portia De Rossi

Love makes mutes of those who habitually speak most fluently. ~ Madeleine De Scudery

He felt his throat constrict. and was overcome with an emotion that he could not name. because it was a mixture of so many. ~ Louis De Bernieres

Technical things are getting more mechanical. Take 'Swan Lake,' the Black Swan pas de deux. Now, my goodness, they're turning not just 32 fouettes - but double or triple pirouettes. ~ Natalia Makarova

Women are not made for one single man; 'tis for men at large Nature created them. ~ Marquis De Sade

The Earth is not just an ordinary planet! One can count, there 111 kings ... ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

It's ludicrous to even talk about (Marquis) de Sade, let alone indulge in all that, when people are being tortured and suffering for real, not for sexual games. I have no interest either in being a victim or in turning others into victims. ~ Francoise Gilot

Man is so complicated a machine that it is impossible to get a clear idea of the machine beforehand, and hence impossible to define it. For this reason, all the investigations have been vain, which the greatest philosophers have made à priori, that is to to say, in so far as they use, as it were, the wings of the spirit. Thus it is only à posteriori or by trying to disentangle the soul from the organs of the body, so to speak, that one can reach the highest probability concerning man's own nature, even though one can not discover with certainty what his nature is. ~ Julien Offray De La Mettrie

I am Bourbon as a matter of honour , royalist according to reason and conviction, and republican by taste and character . ~ Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

For a woman knows the face of the man she loves like a sailor knows the open sea ~ Honore De Balzac

Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate. ~ Alain De Botton

Despotism accomplishes great things illegally; liberty doesn't even go to the trouble of accomplishing small things legally. ~ Honore De Balzac

I'm happy to just be able to come across things. I don't need to be happy. Happiness is a kind of cheap word. Let's face it, I'm not the kind of cat that's going to cut off an ear if I can't do something. I would commit suicide. I would shoot myself in the brain if things got bad. I would jump from a window…you know, I can think about death openly. It's nothing to fear. It's nothing sacred. I've seen so many people die. Life's not sacred either ~ Bob Dylan

Family law is institutionally anti-male. I've been lobbying MPs, and I'm not going to give up campaigning for equality until I get equality. ~ Louis De Bernieres

Never create by law what can be accomplished by morality. ~ Baron De Montesquieu

Human wisdom makes as ill use of her talent when she exercises it in rescinding from the number and sweetness of those pleasures that are naturally our due, as she employs it favorably and well in artificially disguising and tricking out the ills of life to alleviate the sense of them. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The plague of man is boasting of his knowledge. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that. ~ Philip Kaufman

The wish to be elected cannot be more important than the wish to do the right thing. ~ Victor Bello Accioly

When I read 'Dream of Red Mansions,' I was really struck by the fact that it was built differently from a lot of genre works. Specifically, a lot of the events that should have taken centre-stage - wars, social upheavals - were seen entirely through the eyes of the women of a Chinese household. ~ Aliette De Bodard

If anyone gets intoxicated with his knowledge when he looks beneath him, let him turn his eyes upward toward past ages, and he will lower his horns, finding there so many thousands of minds that trample him underfoot. If he gets into some flattering presumption about his valor, let him remember the lives of the two Scipios, so many armies, so many nations, all of whom leave him so far behind them. No particular quality will make a man proud who balances it against the many weaknesses and imperfections that are also in him, and, in the end, against the nullity of man's estate. ~ Michel De Montaigne

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing. ~ Michel De Montaigne

["Love is the love of one {singularly,} with desire to be singularly beloved." - Hobbes{Leviathan, (1651), Part I, Chapter VI}.] ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld