Oscar Wilde Quotes About Sorrow

• 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

  Artist, People, Lovely

  Oscar Wilde (1961). “DE PROFUNDIS”, p.13, VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS

• If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. but if 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 move back again and again and beg to be admitted so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation.

  Oscar Wilde

  Friendship, Moving, Doors

• If a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. But if a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly.

  Oscar Wilde

  Friends, Mind, Sorrow

  Oscar Wilde (1999). “De Profundis: The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Writings”, p.86, Wordsworth Editions

• After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.

  Oscar Wilde

  Past, Mourning, Ignorant

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.343, University of Chicago Press

• Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. ... For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sad, Stars, Pain

• My desire to live is as intense as ever, and though my heart is broken, hearts are made to be broken: that is why God sends sorrow into the world.

  Oscar Wilde

  Heart, Broken, Sorrow

  Oscar Wilde (1962). “The letters of Oscar Wilde”

• 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 center of pain.

  Oscar Wilde

  Pain, Grief, Circles

  Oscar Wilde (1961). “Works: Edited with an Introduction”

• There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth.

  Oscar Wilde

  Grief, Suffering, Sorrow

  Oscar Wilde, Moira Muldoon (2005). “The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings”, p.311, Simon and Schuster

• We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

  Oscar Wilde

  Pain, Prison Time, Jail

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.51, Oxford University Press on Demand

• For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.

  Oscar Wilde

  Grief, Taken, Moon

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.82, Oxford University Press on Demand

• 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.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sad, Pain, Eye

  Oscar Wilde (1909). “De profundus”

• Pleasures may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrows cannot break it. Hearts live by being wounded.

  Oscar Wilde

  Heart, Sorrow, May

  Oscar Wilde, Peter Raby (2008). “The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays: Lady Windermere's Fan; Salome; A Woman of No Importance; An Ideal Husband; The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.151, Oxford Paperbacks

• Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sympathy, Grief, Condolences

  Letter to Alfred Douglas, Jan. - Mar. 1897

• Find expression for a sorrow, and it will become dear to you. Find expression for a joy, and you will intensify its ecstasy.

  Oscar Wilde

  Happiness, Expression, Joy

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.701, GENERAL PRESS

• I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Grief, Men

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.105, Oxford University Press on Demand

• The burden of this world is too great for one man to bear, and the world’s sorrow too heavy for one heart to suffer.

  Oscar Wilde

  Heart, Men, Suffering

  Oscar Wilde, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Novel, Short Stories, Poetry, Essays and Plays”, p.365, GENERAL PRESS

• A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Feeling Sad, Sorrow

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.119, Diversion Books

• It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Years, People

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.85, Oxford University Press on Demand

• There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.

  Oscar Wilde

  Grief, Suffering, Sorrow

  Oscar Wilde (1961). “DE PROFUNDIS”, p.7, VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS

• With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

  Oscar Wilde

  Strong, Passion, Men

  Oscar Wilde (2015). “The Picture of Dorian Gray (Diversion Classics)”, p.219, Diversion Books

• I made your sorrow mine also, that you might have help in bearing it.

  Oscar Wilde

  Sorrow, Might, Helping

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (more than 150 Works)”, p.1766, e-artnow

• Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Pain, Men

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde”, p.1079, Wordsworth Editions

• sorrow...is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it

  Oscar Wilde

  Hands, Sorrow, Wounds

  Oscar Wilde (1961). “DE PROFUNDIS”, p.7, VICTORIA INSTITUTIONS

• Behind Joy and Laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind Sorrow there is always Sorrow. Pain, unlike Pleasure, wears no mask.

  Oscar Wilde

  Laughter, Pain, Joy

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.105, Oxford University Press on Demand

• And now, dear Mr. Worthing, I will not intrude any longer into a house of sorrow. I would merely beg you not to be too much bowed down by grief. What seem to us bitter trials are often blessings in disguise. This seems to me a blessing of an extremely obvious kind.

  Oscar Wilde

  Grief, Blessing, House

  Oscar Wilde (1984). “The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.41, Dramatic Publishing

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