Oscar Wilde
Quotes & Wisdom
Oscar Wilde remains one of literature's most dazzling paradoxes - a man who preached the supremacy of art while becoming the most theatrical figure of his age. Born in Victorian Dublin and ascending to the heights of London society, this Irish playwright, poet, and provocateur wielded wit as both weapon and shield, crafting epigrams that still cut to the quick of human vanity. His works, from the darkly prophetic "The Picture of Dorian Gray" to the sparkling comedies that conquered the West End, grapple with beauty, morality, and the masks we wear. Yet Wilde's own life became his most tragic drama, ending in disgrace, exile, and early death. His influence persists not merely in quotable lines but in how he dared to live publicly, defiantly, as himself.
Context & Background
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde entered the world on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland - then firmly under British rule and still reeling from the Great Famine's devastation. His parents were no ordinary couple: Sir William Wilde was a renowned eye surgeon and antiquarian, while Lady Jane Wilde wrote fiery nationalist poetry under the pen name "Speranza" and hosted one of Dublin's most celebrated literary salons. This household of intellect, eccentricity, and Irish identity would shape everything to come.
The mid-Victorian era into which Wilde matured was an age of stark contradictions. Britain basked in imperial confidence, yet anxious moralism policed every aspect of private life. The rise of aestheticism offered an alternative vision - the radical notion that art existed for its own sake, not to instruct or improve. Walter Pater at Oxford preached living life as a work of art, advice the young Wilde absorbed deeply.
At Trinity College Dublin and then Oxford, Wilde transformed himself from clever Irish outsider to celebrity aesthete. He cultivated long hair, velvet jackets, and a genius for self-promotion that anticipated modern fame. The Aesthetic Movement gave him a philosophy; London society gave him a stage. By his late twenties, Wilde had conquered America on a lecture tour, married, fathered two sons, and positioned himself as the era's most quotable voice on beauty, culture, and the hypocrisies lurking beneath Victorian respectability.
Wilde perfected a distinctive literary weapon: the paradox that inverts conventional wisdom to reveal uncomfortable truths. His famous reversals - "I can resist everything except temptation," "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it" - do more than entertain. They expose the gap between what society professes and how people actually behave.
This technique reached its apex in his society comedies. "Lady Windermere's Fan," "An Ideal Husband," and "The Importance of Being Earnest" sparkle with epigrams while dissecting Victorian double standards about women, money, and respectability. The plots hinge on secrets and double lives - themes that resonated with dangerous personal relevance.
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" deployed paradox more darkly. The novel's premise - a portrait ages while its subject stays young - literalizes the split between public appearance and private corruption. Victorian critics recoiled, sensing something subversive in this story of hidden sins and aesthetic amorality. They weren't wrong.
In 1891, Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas, the young, beautiful, and petulant son of the Marquess of Queensberry. Their relationship would destroy him. The Marquess, enraged by the liaison, publicly accused Wilde of "posing as a sodomite." Against all advice, Wilde sued for libel.
The trials that followed in 1895 became a public spectacle of Victorian morality turning on one of its brightest stars. Wilde's wit, so devastating in drawing rooms, faltered against prosecutors who wielded his own writings as evidence. Found guilty of "gross indecency," he received two years' hard labor - a sentence that broke his health and spirit.
Prison produced one final masterpiece: "De Profundis," a long letter to Douglas that mingles self-justification with genuine spiritual reckoning. Released in 1897, Wilde fled to France, adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth, and never wrote substantially again. He died in a Paris hotel room on November 30, 1900, at forty-six, reportedly quipping about the ugly wallpaper: "One of us had to go."
Wilde's disgrace ensured his works were suppressed for years. Yet his reputation underwent a remarkable resurrection. The twentieth century's relaxation of sexual mores transformed him from cautionary tale to martyr. Gay rights activists claimed him as a forefather who suffered for loving openly in an age that demanded concealment.
His plays never left the repertoire - "The Importance of Being Earnest" remains among the most performed English comedies. His fairy tales reveal unexpected tenderness beneath the glittering surface. And his critical essays anticipate postmodern ideas about masks, surfaces, and the constructed nature of identity.
Wilde's physical presence amplified his legend. Standing over six feet tall with a heavy, fleshy face, he dressed with elaborate care and spoke in a melodious voice that reportedly held listeners spellbound. He ate and drank with gusto, becoming increasingly corpulent during his London years.
His American lecture tour of 1882 showcased remarkable showmanship. Expecting an effete aesthete, Colorado miners found a man who could drink them under the table and lecture about Cellini in a silver mine. He returned with stories of meeting Walt Whitman and the quip that he had nothing to declare but his genius.
Wilde was a devoted father to his sons Cyril and Vyvyan, writing them charming letters and inventing bedtime stories that became "The Happy Prince" collection. After his imprisonment, he never saw them again - his wife changed their surname to Holland, erasing the tainted name.
His final years in Paris were marked by poverty, declining health, and the devotion of a few loyal friends who paid his bills and tolerated his moods. He converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, a faith he had long flirted with for its theatrical rituals and emphasis on sin and redemption. The playwright who had mastered every social mask met death with characteristic ambivalence - neither fully repentant nor wholly defiant, but still, irrepressibly, performing.
Oscar Wilde Quotes
“I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.
Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.
Each man kills the thing he loves.
Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
Its a beautiful woman's fate to be the subject of conversation where ever she goes
Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
What fire does not destroy, it hardens
I'm a man of simple tastes. I'm always satisfied with the best.
I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.
If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of one's neighbor that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently. If he cannot think, it is monstrous to require thought of any kind from him. A red rose is not selfish because it wants to be a red rose. It would be horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be both red and roses.
I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.
Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden."
The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.
He wanted to be where no one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.
Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly normal human being
I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying.
If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
You can never be overdressed or overeducated.
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
A good friend will always stab you in the front.
Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.
Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?
It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.
Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.
If you want to be a doormat you have to lay yourself down first.
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
I drink to separate my body from my soul.
I beg your pardon I didn't recognise you - I've changed a lot.
I have learned this: it is not what one does that is wrong, but what one becomes as a consequence of it.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.
A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.
One should always be a little improbable.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.
For one moment our lives met, our souls touched.
Some things are too important to be taken seriously.
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.
Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.
After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
I have no objection to anyone’s sex life as long as they don’t practice it in the street and frighten the horses.
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.
It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world
To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.
Consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative.
I won't tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world's voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!
Irony is wasted on the stupid
No man is rich enough to buy back his past.
When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible....
They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to think about.
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their charm.
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.