...absolute humility

I've always been a huge fan of Oscar Wilde's writings and still very much am! He was honored as "First in Greats" at Oxford. He was the toast of London and was called "Our most quotable writer after Shakespeare." Yet I wasn't aware that his undisciplined living landed him in prison. From there he wrote some incredibly profound words:

"I must say to myself that I ruined myself. Nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. The gods have given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I surrounded myself with smaller natures and meaner minds. I became the spend-thrift of my own genius. To waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in search of new sensations. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I forgot that every little action of the common day, makes or unmakes character, and therefore what one has done in the secret chamber, one has someday to cry aloud on the housetop. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility."

In the end Oscar Wilde lost his family, his fortune, his self-respect and his will to live. He died bankrupt and broken at 46.