If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment.

The wording in circulation (“If you want to be a grocer, or a general…”) appears to come from a 2010 Stephen Fry performance/interview where he presented it as a Wilde quote. The underlying idea and several key elements (grocer, politician/MP, judge, ‘punishment’, and the contrast with self-realization/artistic life) closely track a passage in Wilde’s prison letter/essay “De Profundis” (written 1897; published 1905), but the popular phrasing looks like Fry’s paraphrase rather than a verbatim Wilde line.

The point is that aiming to become a socially legible role can be self-fulfilling but spiritually narrowing: you may achieve the label you chase, yet that very success can trap you in a persona. By contrast, an artistic or self-realizing life is uncertain and resists fixed identity; the ‘reward’ is freedom from becoming a single, settled thing.

“A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment.”

If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment.