Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s saw him become one of the most popular playwrights in London. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for “gross indecency”, imprisonment, and early death at age 46.
Wilde’s parents were successful Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, Wilde read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new “English Renaissance in Art” and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in French while in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being performed in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men. After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years’ hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On his release, he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.
We have compiled some of the greatest Inspirational quotes of Oscar Wilde.
Oscar Wilde Inspirational Quotes
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
– Oscar Wilde
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
– Oscar Wilde
“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
“The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.”
– Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Greatest Quotes
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
– Oscar Wilde
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde
“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
– Oscar Wilde
“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?”
– Oscar Wilde
“Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
– Oscar Wilde
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
– Oscar Wilde
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
– Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Life Changing Quotes
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
– Oscar Wilde
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
– Oscar Wilde
“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
“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.”
– Oscar Wilde
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
– Oscar Wilde
“A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.”
– Oscar Wilde
“To define is to limit.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.”
– Oscar Wilde
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”
– Oscar Wilde
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
– Oscar Wilde
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”
– Oscar Wilde
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
– Oscar Wilde
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
– Oscar Wilde
“I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
– Oscar Wilde
“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
– Oscar Wilde
“I am not young enough to know everything.”
– Oscar Wilde
“You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The heart was made to be broken.”
– Oscar Wilde
“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
– Oscar Wilde
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
– Oscar Wilde
“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.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The world is a stage and the play is badly cast.”
– Oscar Wilde
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.”
– Oscar Wilde
“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”
– Oscar Wilde
“There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde
“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”.
– Oscar Wilde
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
– Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde Great Quotes
“We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.”
– Oscar Wilde
“One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that would tell one anything.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The nicest feeling in the world is to do a good deed anonymously-and have somebody find out.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
– Oscar Wilde
“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”
– Oscar Wilde
“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.”
– Oscar Wilde
“It takes great deal of courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.”
– Oscar Wilde