Oscar Wilde (1854–1900,) fully Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, was an Irish playwright, poet, essayist, editor, and author of many witty epigrams. Wilde’s dazzling ascension to notoriety also included his tragic fall from grace.
Wilde was born in Dublin. His father was a successful surgeon and his mother, a writer and a literary host. Wilde was educated at Dublin’s Trinity College and Oxford’s Magdalen College. After graduation, he moved to London to pursue a literary career, announcing, “I’ll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I’ll be famous, and if not famous I’ll be notorious.”
Wilde’s output was diverse. The first volume of his poetry was published in 1881. He contributed to publications such as the Pall Mall Gazette, wrote fairy tales, and published a novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891.)
Wilde’s most exceptional talent was for writing plays, and he produced a string of extremely popular comedies including Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892,) Salome (1892,) An Ideal Husband (1895,) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895.)
Drama and tragedy stained Wilde’s private life. He married Constance Lloyd in 1884. Even when he loved his wife and adored his two sons, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of an aristocrat. This resulted in one of the most famous trials of the 19th century. Wilde lost a libel suit after being accused as a homosexual. The prosecution exposed many details of Wilde’s private life. He was arrested, tried for gross indecency, and sentenced to two years of hard labor.
When he got out of prison, he wrote his most celebrated poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898,) concerning inhumane prison conditions. With his reputation ruined, he wandered around France and Italy. His health declined rapidly, and he died penniless in a seedy Paris hotel at age 46.
Wilde is considered the world’s most fabulous wit ever. He was a brilliant conversationalist; anecdotes abound about his famous retorts. Once, when U.S. Customs asked him if he had anything to declare upon his arrival in New York, Wilde replied, “Nothing but my genius.”
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Oscar Wilde
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Music
Woman begins by resisting a man’s advances and ends by blocking his retreat.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: One liners, Women
With an evening coat and a white tie, anybody, even a stock broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.
—Oscar Wilde
Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which is never advisable.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Marriage, Society
One’s only real life is the life one never leads.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Self-Discovery
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Sin
The exquisite art of idleness, one of the most important things that any University can teach.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Universities, Colleges, Education
I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the house-tops.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Integrity
A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Morals
And beauty is a form of genius—is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Beauty, Explanation
They are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Husbands, Marriage
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
Topics: Money
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.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Music
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: America
They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Romance
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Men & Women
Absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Style, Taste
The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Sickness, Disease
It is a curious fact that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: People
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Youth, Idleness, Perfection
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
—Oscar Wilde
If they have not opened the eyes of the blind, they have at least given great encouragement to the short-sighted, and while their leaders may have all the inexperience of old age, their young men are far too wise to be ever sensible.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Encouragement
Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: One liners, Memories, Memory
Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Politics
No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
—Oscar Wilde
There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Fortune, Misfortunes
No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Opinion, Opinions
For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinners.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Fashion
I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across … Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Criticism
You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Aristocracy
Self-denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.
—Oscar Wilde
Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Humankind, Action
An inordinate passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Pleasure
All art is quite useless.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Arts, Art, One liners, Artists
A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Enemy, Choices, Choice, Enemies
A man who marries his mistress leaves a vacancy in that position.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Men
He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that’s so important nowadays.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Politics
Pleasure is Nature.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Pleasure
If a man needs an elaborate tombstone in order to remain in the memory of his country, it is clear that his living at all was an act of absolute superfluity.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Legacy
What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.
—Oscar Wilde
Topics: Property
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