Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin (1854), who was already a successful playwright when he fell into a love affair with the young aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was married with two children at the time, and the affair ruined his reputation in society. He later wrote, "I curse myself night and day for my folly in allowing him to dominate my life." But it was the most creative period of his life. He wrote three plays in two years about people leading double lives, including A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), about two men who use an imaginary person named Earnest to get themselves out of all kinds of situations, until their invented stories and identities get so complicated that everything is revealed.
The actor who played Algernon Moncrieff later said, "In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest." But that same year, Wilde was accused of sodomy by the father of his lover. Wilde might have let the accusation pass, but he chose to sue his accuser for libel, because he thought he could win the case by his eloquence alone. Private detectives had dug up so much damning evidence on Wilde that he was convicted of sodomy and sentenced to two years of hard labor. His plays continued to be produced on the stage, but his name was removed from all the programs. He was released from prison in 1897 and died three years later in a cheap Paris hotel.
Oscar Wilde, who said, "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling." And, "An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."
Wilde's mother was a famous poet and journalist and Irish nationalist. His father was an ear and eye doctor. Oscar went to college at Oxford where he began to affect an aristocratic accent and began dressing in velvet knee breeches. He stayed in England after college and became part of a movement in art and literature called Aestheticism, whose motto was "Art for art's sake."
Oscar Wilde said, "Even a good sense of color is more important in the development of the individual than a sense of right and wrong."
He went on a big lecture tour of the United States, traveling to Des Moines, Denver, St. Paul, Houston, and Pennsylvania—just to name a few. He returned to London in 1883 and made his reputation in 1891 with his first and only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a beautiful young man who remains young while a portrait of him grows old.
And then in the 1890s, Oscar Wilde burst on the British theater scene with four consecutive comedy hits: Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Oscar Wilde said, "There is no such thing as a romantic experience. There are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so."
*A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
*A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
*Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
*America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
*America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
*Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
*Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
*At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.
*Biography lends to death a new terror.
*Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
*Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
*Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
*Genius is born--not paid.
*I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
*I am not young enough to know everything.
*I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability.
*I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
*If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
*Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
*It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
*It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is fatal.
*Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
*Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
*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.
*Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone elses opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
*Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.
*One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.
*One should always play fairly when one has the winning cards.
*Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
*Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
*Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
*The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for.
*The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.
*The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
*The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
*There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
*To disagree with three-fourths of the British public is one of the first requisites of sanity.
*We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities.
*We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.
*Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.
*Why was I born with such contemporaries?
*Wisdom comes with winters.
*One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
"The Picture of Dorian Gray"
*The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
"The Remarkable Rocket"
*The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived.
A Woman of No Importance, Act 3
*I don't play accurately-any one can play accurately- but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.
Algernon from The Importance of Being Earnest
*When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
An Ideal husband
*Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
An Ideal Husband, 1893, Act I
*Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons.
De Profundis
*Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
De Profundis, 1905
*Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
*One's real life is often the life that one does not lead.
*My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people's.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892
*I can resist anything but temptation.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act I
*It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act I
*Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act I
*Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III
*Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III
*We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III
*What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892, Act III
*Only the shallow know themselves.
*We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
*But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all.
*The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
*One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
*Do not speak ill of society, Algie. Only people who can't get in do that.
The Importance of Being Earnest
*The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
The Importance of Being Earnest
*To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
*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.
*Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
*I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
*I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
*I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
*One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
*Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.
*The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has
*The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
*There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
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