Today marks the birthday of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900,) the Anglo-Irish playwright considered one of the greatest writers of the Victorian Era.
In his 30s, although married with two children, Oscar Wilde had a love affair with a young aristocrat. The affair became public; the revelation of Wilde’s homosexual double life ruined his reputation in the Victorian society. Still, this was the most creative period of his life. He wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Salome (1891), and Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892.) He then erupted on the British theater scene with three successive comedy hits featuring people leading double lives: A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895.)
His masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest opened in London on Valentine’s Day 1895. It featured two protagonists who keep up fictitious personas to dodge burdensome social obligations until their sham identities and stories grow so intricate that everything gets revealed.
A few months later, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for homosexuality. When he got out of prison, he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898,) a poem concerning inhumane prison conditions. With his reputation ruined, he wandered around France and Italy. Wilde’s health declined rapidly and he died penniless in a seedy hotel in Paris at the age of 46.
Oscar Wilde is considered the world’s greatest wit ever. He was a brilliant conversationalist; anecdotes abound about his well-known retorts. Once, when US Customs asked him if he had anything to declare upon arrival in New York, Wilde replied, “Nothing but my genius.”
Entire books have been devoted to Oscar Wilde’s one-liners. He said, “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” And, “I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.” And, “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
Inspirational Quotations by Oscar Wilde
What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Experience, the name men give to their mistakes.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell that would tell anything.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatever to do.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Life is not complex. We are complex. Life is simple, and the simple thing is the right thing.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Only good questions deserve good answers.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
When I was young I used to think that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know it is.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
An acquaintance that begins with a compliment is sure to develop into a real friendship.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
One should always be a little improbable.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Life is much too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Charity creates a multitude of sins.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
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.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
When a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
The supreme vice is shallowness.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
‘Know thyself’ was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, ‘Be thyself’ shall be written.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
When the gods choose to punish us, they merely answer our prayers.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Skepticism is the beginning of Faith.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
I can resist everything except temptation.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it’s impossible to count them accurately.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)