A customs officer once asked Oscar Wilde if he had anything to declare. He replied: “Only my genius.” Fifteen years later, alone and broken in prison, he reflected on his life and said. “I have been a spendthrift of my genius… The gods gave me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into senseless and sensual ease…Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in search for new sensation… 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 from the house-top. I allowed pleasure to dominate me and I ended in horrible disgrace.”
The sad story of Oscar Wilde recalls the words of scripture: ‘Pride precedes destruction; an arrogant spirit appears before a fall.’