Meaning

Wilde is making a sharp observation about conformity and the loss of a genuine inner life. When he writes that most people's thoughts are really someone else's opinions, he is pointing to a kind of intellectual passivity, a habit of absorbing the ready-made views of others rather than forming one's own. The progression through thoughts, lives, and passions builds a portrait of a person who is, in effect, living secondhand. The word "quotation" in the final position is especially cutting, turning a person's deepest feelings into something borrowed rather than felt.

Context

This passage comes from De Profundis, a long letter Wilde wrote while serving a two-year prison sentence with hard labor. The letter is addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, the relationship with whom had contributed directly to Wilde's ruin. Written in circumstances of genuine suffering, the text moves between recrimination, sorrow, and philosophical reflection. The observation about borrowed lives carries extra weight given where Wilde was writing from: a man who had once been at the center of London's social and artistic world, now stripped of almost everything, thinking hard about what is real and what is performed.

About the author

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and wit who rose to extraordinary fame in late nineteenth-century London through his plays, stories, poetry, and public persona. His work consistently questioned social pretension and celebrated individual expression. His imprisonment under laws criminalizing homosexual conduct ended his public career, but De Profundis and his other late writings show an intellect that remained penetrating even in the worst of circumstances. He died in Paris in 1900.