“No man is rich enough to buy back his past”
How much you want it, it is impossible to change the past. You cannot undo whatever you did. There’s no real second chance to do something better or to stop doing it. Money can do a lot of things. You can buy your own country, you can buy love, you can get whatever you want, wherever you want it, whenever you want it. You can make of the future whatever you want to make of it. But money cannot change the past. Nothing can change the past.
I believe this quote is from ‘The picture of Dorian Gray.’ Dorian did horrible things that he at one point in the story wants to make up. But he cannot find a way, and his portrait (that grew uglier with every bad thing he did) wouldn’t change back. What’s done cannot be undone.
Everyone including myself should agree with this quote. It is completely impossible to buy back time in the past. But we should pay attention to the ‘enough’ in Wilde’s quote. Literally he says that no one is rich enough to buy back his past. This insinuates that more money than the richest man in the world maybe can give the possibility to gain time in the past. Maybe he believed in science to produce a time traveller? The only question then should be: is travelling to the past, still the past? Isn’t it the future? If we travel tomorrow to the past, is it history or future? So loads of money could finance scientific research for such invention.
Maybe Oscar Wilde meant another form of richness. Maybe he didn’t mean for it to be about money. People can be rich with happiness, believe, love, faith. Someone can even be rich with hate. Still, none of this can buy back the past.
Another possibility is that Wilde really didn’t thought about this quote. A man like him, who was known for his quotes and one-liners, shall have been under a pressure and maybe he started quoting things that weren’t thought about. Of course there aren’t a lot of people who’d like to believe this. Neither would I.
