In our attempts to build principle-centered homes, sometimes we are tempted to think that if we could just find and teach our children true principles, we'd be home free! Unfortunately, that's not how it works. 

The life of Oscar Wilde is a perfect tutorial in principles ignored. Even though he was brilliant and funny, even though he was handed everything in life on a silver platter, even though he understand natural laws and principles well enough to write profound moral stories, he never listened to his own conscience. Even at the end, when it was clear his way didn't work and he seemed on the verge of confessing all and changing his ways, his willfulness and pride continued to stand in the way.

Join Audrey this week for an in-depth look at what happens when you know the principles but you refuse to let them save you. 

Listener's Guide:
Use the time stamps below to skip to any part of the podcast. 

1:50  Oscar Wilde's childhood
4:15  Wilde's new worldview and fame
9:45  Wilde marries, has peace and begins rebelling
12:19  The Picture of Dorian Gray
19:42  Wilde spirals downward
27:25  De Profundis
33:40  Lord Alfred's reflections

Quotes from this episode:
“The artist is the creator of beautiful things...There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all...All art is quite useless.” ~Oscar Wilde from the Introduction of The Picture of Dorian Gray
Quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.”
“Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”
“I am perfectly happy now. I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don’t sneer at it, Harry, any more—at least, not before me. I want to be good.”
“He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.”

Quotes from De Profundis:

"She and my father had bequeathed me a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology, and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation.  I had disgraced that name eternally.  I had made it a low by-word among low people.  I had dragged it through the very mire.  I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly."

"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.  But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease.  I amused myself with being a flâneur, 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,