Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-10-16 – 1900-11-30) was an Irish playwright, poet and author of essays and novels.

Sourced

• God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.
  • Sheridan Morley, "Oscar Wilde" (George Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1976), p. 31.
  • Reply to his friend and contemporary David Hunter-Blair who asked him what his real ambition was, in about 1878.

• 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)

• Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.
  • 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)

• Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
  • Letter to James McNeill Whistler (23 February 1885)

• A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
  • The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889)

• The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.
  • Review of Herbert Giles translation of the works of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tsu) in The Speaker (8 February 1890)

• Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
  • "The Relation of Dress to Art," The Pall Mall Gazette (February 28, 1885)
  • reprinted in Aristotle at Afternoon Tea:The Rare Oscar Wilde (1991)

• 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)

• 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)

• We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
  • The Canterville Ghost (1887)

• 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)

• All art is immoral.
  • Intentions (1891)

• 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)

• le mystère de l'amour est plus grand que le mystère de la mort.
• The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.
  • Salomé (1893)

• On [George Bernard Shaw] An excellent man: he has no enemies, and none of his friends like him.
  • Quoted by George Bernard Shaw in a letter to Ellen Terry, 25 September 1896

• 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.

• 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.
  • Letter from Paris, (May 1900)

• It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
  • The Model Millionaire, 1912.

• Tell me, when you are alone with him [ Max Beerbohm ] Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?
  • In a letter to Ada Leverson [Sphinx] recorded in her book Letters To The Sphinx From Oscar Wilde and Reminiscences of the Author (1930)

The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)

• "She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student; "but in all my garden there is no red rose."
  • "The Nightingale and the Rose"

• Be happy, be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty.
  • "The Nightingale and the Rose"

• Why, what a wonderful piece of luck! Here is a red rose! I have never seen any rose like it in all my life. It is so beautiful that I am sure it has a long Latin name.
  • "The Nightingale and the Rose"

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

The Decay of Lying (1889)

• Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

• It is always the unreadable that occurs.

• His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning.
  • A reference to George Meredith's style.

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

• Art persists, it timelessly continues.

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

• There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other---by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought.
  • Pt. I

• Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes his biography.
  • Pt. I / Gilbert

• Truth, in the matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
  • Pt. I

• Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
  • Pt. I

• I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
  • Pt. I

• The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite 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

• To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
  • Pt. II

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.
  • Lord Darlington, Act I
  • Often quoted as: Life is far too important to be taken seriously.

• 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

• Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
  • Lord Darlington, 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

A Woman of No Importance (1893)

• The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
  • Kelvil, Act I

• 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.
  • Lord Illingworth, Act I

• The English country gentleman galloping after a fox — the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.
  • Lord Illingworth, Act I

• Kelvil: May I ask, Lord Illingworth, if you regard the House of Lords as a better institution than the House of Commons?
  Lord Illingworth: A much better institution of course. We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.
  • 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

• Lady Hunstanton: But do you believe all that is written in the newspapers?
  Lord Illingworth: I do. Nowadays it is only the unreadable that occurs.
  • Act I

• Gerald: I suppose society is wonderfully delightful?
  Lord Illingworth: To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy.
  • Act III

• Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
  • Lord Illingworth, Act III

• I am always astonishing myself. It is the only thing that makes life worth living.
  • Lord Illingworth, Act III

• Children love their parents. Eventually they come to judge them. Rarely do they forgive them.
  • Mrs. Arbuthnot, Act IV

A Few Maxims For The Instruction Of The Over-Educated (1894)

First published anonymously in the Saturday Review (17 November 1894) Full text online

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

• The English are always degrading truths into facts. When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value.

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

• The only link between Literature and the Drama left to us in England at the present moment is the bill of the play.

• 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.

• Friendship is far more tragic than love. It lasts longer.

• Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.

• To be really mediæval one should have no body. To be really modern one should have no soul. To be really Greek one should have no clothes.

• Even the disciple has his uses. He stands behind one's throne, and at the moment of one's triumph whispers in one's ear that, after all, one is immortal.

• The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. The only thing that can console one for being rich is economy.

• Those whom the gods love grow young.

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

First published in the Oxford student magazine The Chameleon (December 1894) Full text online

• Ambition is the last refuge of the 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.

• One should always be a little improbable.

• Time is a waste of money.

• The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.

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

• The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous.
  • Algernon, Act I

• My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.
  • Jack, Act I

• 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.
  • 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
    • Often quoted as "The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."

• 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

• A Handbag?
  • Lady Bracknell, Act I

• 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.
  • Jack, Act I

• No gentleman ever has any money.
  • Algernon, Act II

• 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.
  • Algernon, Act II

• 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

• I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
  • Cecily, 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

• Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One must eat muffins quite calmly, it is the only way to eat them.
  • Algernon, 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

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.
  • Mrs Cheveley, Act I
  • Usually quoted as: No man is rich enough to buy back his own past.

• 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

• Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
  • 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

• Lord Caversham: No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.
  Lord Goring: Quite so. And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it, do we, father?
  • Act III

• Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.
  • Lord Goring, Act IV

• When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.
  • Lord Goring, Act IV

• 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

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.
• A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.

• 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.

• Closed eyes listen, afraid to see on their own. Easily influenced and simply conformed.

• 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.

• In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the Press.

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

• And alien tears will fill for him
  Pity's long-broken urn,
  For his mourners will be outcast men,
  And outcasts always mourn.
  • Pt. IV, st. 23 -- Wilde's epitaph

• 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

• And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
  In Humanity's machine.
  • Pt. V, st. 7

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

De Profundis (1895)

• 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.

• Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Unsourced

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. Once quote has been sourced, please remove it from this section and place it in the proper area of the "Sourced" section above.

• The only creative thought one can have in an institution is how to get out.

• A true friend stabs you in the front

• Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

• Bigamy is having a wife too many, monogamy is the same.

• 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.

• 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 also since gone and the room re-furnished in the style of one of Wilde's London flats. See also Famous last words.
  • Sometimes misquoted as "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."

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

• I have nothing to declare except my Genius.
  • 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 is by Arthur Ransome in his 1912 book Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study. For more see: http://www.owsoa.org/quotations1.htm

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

• Illusion is the first of all pleasures.

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

• Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

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

• Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

• Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

• Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
  • Quoted by Frank Harris in Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (1916)

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, Oscar Wilde has ensued with his opulence of twaddle and his penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck, to the capital edification of circumjacent fools and foolesses, fooling with their foolers. He has tossed off the top of his head and uttered himself in copious overflows of ghastly bosh. The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it—says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. Therefore is the she fool enamored of the feel of his tongue in her ear to tickle her understanding. The limpid and spiritless vacuity of this intellectual jelly-fish is in ludicrous contrast with the rude but robust mental activities that he came to quicken and inspire. Not only has he no thought, but no thinker. His lecture is mere vebal ditchwater—meaningingless, trite and without coherence. It lacks even the nastiness that exalts and refines his verse. Moreover, it is obviously his own; he had not even the energy and independence to steal it. And so, with a knowledge that would equip and idiot to dispute with a cast-iron dog, and eloquence to qualify him for the duties of a caller on a hog-ranche, and an imagination adequate to the conception of a tom-cat, when fired by contemplation of a fiddle-string, this consummate and star-like youth, missing everything his heaven-appointed functions and offices, wanders about, posing as a statute of himself, and, like the sun-smitten image of Memnon, emitting meaningless murmurs in the blaze of women’s eyes. He makes me tired. And this gawky gowk has the divine effrontery to link his name with those of Swinburne, Rossetti and Morris—this dunghill he-hen would fly with eagles. He dares to set his tongue to the honored name of Keats. He is the leader, quoth’a, of a renaissance in art, this man who cannot draw–of a revival of letters, this man who cannot write! This little and looniest of a brotherhood of simpletons, whom the wicked wits of London, haling him dazed from his obscurity, have crowned and crucified as King of the Cranks, has accepted the distinction in stupid good faith and our foolish people take him at his word. Mr. Wilde is pinnacled upon a dazzling eminence but the earth still trembles to the dull thunder of the kicks that set him up.
  • 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.

• The same lesson [of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker] was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw.
  • G.K. Chesterton in "Heretics," 1905.

• The dinner table was Wilde's event and made him the greatest talker of his time…
  • William Butler Yeats in Four Years 1891

• "Leyendo y releyendo, a lo largo de los años, a Wilde, noto un hecho que sus panegiristas no parecen haber sospechado siquiera: el hecho comprobable y elemental de que Wilde, casi siempre, tiene razón."
  • Reading and re-reading Wilde throughout the years, I notice a fact that people who praise him apparently haven't in the very least: the basic and verifiable fact that Wilde is almost always right.
    • Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, Vol. II, p. 70

• "Como Chesterton, como Lang, como Boswell, Wilde es de aquellos venturosos que pueden prescindir de la aprobación de la crítica y aun, a veces, de la aprobación del lector, pues el agrado que nos proporciona su trato es irresistible y constante."
  • Like Chesterton, like Lang, like Boswell, Wilde is one of the happy few who do not need the approval of the critic, nor even, sometimes, the approval of the reader, for the pleasure they give us is constant and irresistible.
    • Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, Vol. II, p. 71

• "I wish I'd said that"

  (by Wilde, to a witty remark by ), to which Whistler riposted:

  • "You will, Oscar, you will!"
  • • Quoted in James McNeil Whistler by Lisa N. Peters, p. 57, ISBN 1-880908-70-0.

Misattributed

• Why was I born with such contemporaries?
  • George Bernard Shaw Preface to The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910)

• I'm not young enough to know everything.
  • J. M. Barrie The Admirable Crichton, Act I (1903)