Oscar Wilde

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We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, poet, and author of essays and novels.

1 Sourced
2 Attributed
3 About Oscar Wilde
4 External links

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Miscellaneous Sources

Tread Lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
- Requiescat, st. 1 (1881)

Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance —
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?
- Helas!, l. 12-14 (1881)

Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.
- Personal Impressions of America (Leadville) (1883)

And down the long and silent street,
The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet,
Crept like a frightened girl.
- The Harlot's House, st. 12 (1885)

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
- "The Relation of Dress to Art," The Pall Mall Gazette (February 28, 1885)

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
- "The Children of the Poets," The Pall Mall Gazette (October 14, 1886)

Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event.
- "A New Calendar," The Pall Mall Gazette (February 17, 1887)

A simile committing suicide is always a depressing spectacle.
- "The Poets' Corner III," The Pall Mall Gazette (May 30, 1887)

He is really not so ugly after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him.
- "The Birthday of the Infanta," The House of Pomegranates (1892)

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
- Note: Wilde said this in the Left Bank hotel in Paris where he passed away on November 30, 1900. The wallpaper has since been removed and the room re-furnished in the style of one of Wilde's London flats. See also Famous last words.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
- The Canterville Ghost

And, after all, what is a fashion? From the artistic point of view, it is usually a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
- Literary and Other Notes I, Woman's World (November 1887)

Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.
- The Remarkable Rocket

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
- The Portrait of Mr. W. H.

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The Decay of Lying (1889)

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

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The Critic as Artist (1891)

Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
- Pt. I

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
- Pt. I

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
- Pt. II

As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
- Pt. II

There is no sin except stupidity.
- Pt. II

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
- Preface

All art is quite useless.
- Preface

A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
- Preface

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
- Preface

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
- Ch. 1

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.
- Ch. 1

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
- Ch. 1

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
- Ch. 1

When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them.
- Ch. 1

The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
- Ch. 1

The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
- Ch. 1

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.
- Ch. 1

Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.
- Ch. 1

Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.
- Ch. 1

Genius lasts longer than beauty.
- Ch. 1

If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.
- Ch. 1

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
- Ch. 2

He knew the precise psychological moment when to say nothing.
- Ch. 2

The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
- Ch. 2

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
- Ch. 2

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
- Ch. 2

Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.
- Ch. 2

I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
- Ch. 3

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
- Ch. 3

Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
- Ch. 4

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.
- Ch. 4

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
- Ch. 4

When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.
- Ch. 4

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.
- Ch. 4

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
- Ch. 4

The people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure.
- Ch. 4

Punctuality is the thief of time.
- Ch. 4

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
- Ch. 4

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
- Ch. 5

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
- Ch. 6

Conscience makes egotists of us all.
- Ch. 8

It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
- Ch. 8

You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
- Ch. 8

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.
- Ch. 8

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
- Ch. 15

Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.
- Ch. 15

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
- Ch. 15

It is perfectly monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
- Ch. 15

Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.
- Ch. 17

To be popular one must be a mediocrity.
- Ch. 17

To define is to limit.
- Ch. 17

A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
- Ch. 18

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
- Ch. 19

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Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)

Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can pay.
- Lord Darlington, Act I

I can resist everything except temptation.
- Lord Darlington, Act I

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
Usually quoted as: Life is far too important to be taken seriously.
- Lord Darlington, Act I

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
- Mr. Dumby, Act II

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.
- Cecil Graham, Act II

My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
- Cecil Graham, Act III

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
- Lord Darlington, Act III

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
- Mr. Dumby, Act III

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
- Lord Darlington, Act III

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
- Mr. Dumby, Act III

I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades, thirty when there are not.
- Mrs. Erlynne, Act IV

What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.
- Lady Windermere, Act IV

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Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young (1894)

Ambition is the last refuge of failure.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

Only the shallow know themselves.

In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.

The old believe everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

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A Woman of No Importance (1893)

Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton, that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America.
- Act I

The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years.
- Act I

Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations.
- Act I

I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.
- Act III

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.
- Act III

The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
- Act III

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The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
- Algernon, Act I

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
- Lady Bracknell, Act I

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.
- Algernon, Act I

Ah! That must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner.
- Algernon, Act I

To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
- Lady Bracknell, Act I

An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be.
- Lady Bracknell, Act I

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
- Algernon, Act I

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
- Algernon, Act I

I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.
- Algernon, Act I

In married life, three is company, and two is none.
- Algernon, Act I

Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
- Algernon, Act I

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.
- Algernon, Act I

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.
- Lady Bracknell, Act I

Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
- Algernon, Act I

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
- Gwendolen, Act II

The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not?
- Gwendolen, Act II

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
- Miss Prism, Act II

The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.
- Cecily, Act II

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
- Lady Bracknell, Act III

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.
- Lady Bracknell, Act III

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
- Lady Bracknell, Act III

I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
- Jack, Act III

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An Ideal Husband (1895)

Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
- Mrs Cheveley, Act I

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.
Usually quoted as: No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.
- Mrs Cheveley, Act I

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
- Lord Goring, Act I

Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do.
- Mrs Chevely, Act I

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.
- Lord Goring, Act I

Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.
- Lord Goring, Act II

All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.
- Sir Robert Chiltern, Act II

Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
- Lord Goring, Act III

The only possible society is oneself.
- Lord Goring, Act III

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
- Lord Goring, Act III

However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.
- Lord Goring, Act III

Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose.
- Lord Goring, Act III

No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.
- Lord Caversham, Act III

And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it [common sense], do we, father?
- Lord Goring, Act III

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
- Lord Goring, Act IV

My dear father, when one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
- Lord Goring, Act IV

My dear father, if we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.
- Lord Goring, Act IV

I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.
- Lord Goring, Act IV

Now don't stir. I'll be back in five minutes. And don't fall into any temptations while I am away.
- Miss Mabel Chiltern to Lord Goring, just after accepting his proposal, Act IV

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The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1895)

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

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The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky.
- Pt. I, st. 3

When a voice behind me whispered low,
"That fellow's got to swing."
- Pt. I, st. 4

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
- Pt. I, st. 7

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!
- Pt. II, st. 9

Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
- Pt. III, st. 29

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
- Pt. III, st. 35

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
- Pt. V, st. 1

The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison air;
It is only what is good in man
That wastes and withers there;
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate
And the Warder is Despair.
- Pt. V, st. 5

How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?
- Pt. V, st. 14

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De Profundis (1905)

I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.

A thing is, according to the mode in which one looks at it.

It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.

The supreme vice is shallowness.

We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour.

We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken.

When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

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Attributed

Note: A great many misquotations are attributed to Wilde. Please seek to verify the provenance of any quotations you believe should be ascribed to him.

A true friend stabs you in the front

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

All art is immoral. Intentions, 1891.

All bad art is the result of good intentions.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between (also attributed to George Bernard Shaw and Georges Clemenceau).

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. Intentions, 1891.

Buck up and be jolly, my dear lady! Stillbirth is a sign that God has a sense of humour!
- Notes: It is claimed that Wilde said this upon visiting a London birthing ward and visiting with a distraught mother who had just birthed stillborn twins.

Chaos, illuminated by flashes of lightning.
- A reference to Robert Browning's style, noted in Ada Leverson's Letters to the Sphinx, 1930.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes his biography. Intentions, 1891.

I am dying as I have lived: beyond my means.
- Note: Wilde is supposed to have said this on his deathbed, while drinking a glass of champagne.

I am not young enough to know everything.

I don't recognize you - I've changed a lot.

I have nothing to declare except my Genius.
- Notes: This is one of Wilde's most famous sayings, which he is supposed to have said while passing through a customs checkpoint in New York. However, there is no contemporary evidence that such words were ever uttered, and the first record of them (by Frank Harris in his 1916 book Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions) did not appear until many years later, so this is most likely apocryphal.

I have but the simplest taste - I am always satisfied with the best.

I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
- Written in a letter from Reading Prison to Lord Alfred Douglas in early 1897.

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills.

No gentleman ever has any money.

One of the requisites of sanity is to disagree with the majority of the British public.

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Tell me, when you are alone with Max, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?
- Quoted in W. H. Auden's Forewords and Afterwords, 1973.

When a man does exactly what a woman expects him to do she doesn't think much of him. One should always do what a woman doesn't expect, just as one should say what she doesn't understand.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?

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About Oscar Wilde

No, I've never cared for his work. Too scented.
- Rudyard Kipling, quoted by Harry Ricketts in The Unforgiving Minute, 1999.

An Assyrian wax statue, effeminate, but with the vitality of twenty men.
- Max Beerbohm, quoted in Cecil Beaton's diary, September 1953.

From the beginning Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands.
- W. H. Auden, "An Improbable Life," review of The Letters of Oscar Wilde (editor, Rupert Hart-Davis) in The New Yorker, 9 March 1963.

What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platter the plums for the puddings he peddles in the provinces.
- James McNeill Whistler in The World, November 1886.

That sovereign of insufferables.
- Ambrose Bierce in Wasp, 1882.

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.
- Dorothy Parker in A Pig's-Eye View of Literature, 1937.

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