Oscar Wilde Quotes Beyond Dorian Gray: The Plays, Essays and Letters

The best Oscar Wilde quotes outside Dorian Gray come from four society comedies, a handful of essays written as dialogues, and one long letter from prison. Below are fourteen of them, each copied from the full public-domain text and cited to the act or essay, with a note on who says it and what is going on when they do. Wilde rarely speaks in his own voice, and that turns out to matter.

The novel has its own page, Oscar Wilde’s best lines from The Picture of Dorian Gray, so nothing from it is repeated here.

Oscar Wilde quotes from The Importance of Being Earnest

The cast page of the Gutenberg text records the first performance at the St. James’s Theatre on February 14th, 1895. It is the play where every character talks like Wilde, which is part of the joke.

1. Lady Bracknell on carelessness

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Lady Bracknell, The Importance of Being Earnest, First Act

Jack has just proposed to Gwendolen, and her mother is interviewing him like a bank. He admits he does not know who his parents were: he was found in a hand-bag in the cloak-room at Victoria Station. Lady Bracknell treats being orphaned as a lapse in manners. The line is cruel, and it is also the plot, because the hand-bag is what eventually solves everything.

2. Algernon on the truth

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, The Importance of Being Earnest, First Act

Jack has just confessed that “Ernest”, his wicked younger brother in town, is invented, and he calls this the whole truth pure and simple. Algernon pounces on the cliché. The second sentence is the one people drop, and it is the better one: Wilde is defending his own trade, which depends on the truth being complicated.

3. Miss Prism on fiction

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Miss Prism, The Importance of Being Earnest, Second Act

The governess is describing a three-volume novel she wrote in earlier days. It sounds like a throwaway, but it is planted. In the Third Act, Lady Bracknell reveals that the manuscript of that novel was found in a perambulator in Bayswater, in place of the baby Miss Prism was minding. Her theory of fiction is the theory the play then cheerfully obeys.

4. Gwendolen on style

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.

Gwendolen, The Importance of Being Earnest, Third Act

Cecily has just said she does not believe Algernon’s excuse, but that this does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer. Gwendolen agrees. It is the play’s subtitle, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, turned into a rule of conduct, and the two young women apply it to their fiancés with complete seriousness.

Lady Windermere’s Fan: Wilde’s lines in a melodrama

Wilde’s first society comedy opened at the St. James’s Theatre on February 22nd, 1892, according to the cast page of the Gutenberg edition. Its plot is a melodrama about a reputation. The epigrams are mostly given to men who are about to behave badly.

5. Lord Darlington on temptation

I can resist everything except temptation.

Lord Darlington, Lady Windermere’s Fan, First Act

Lady Windermere has just told him an adjective he used was unnecessary, and he answers that he couldn’t help it. So the most famous confession of weakness in English comedy is, in context, an apology for a compliment. It is also a warning she misses: Darlington spends the play trying to persuade her to leave her husband.

6. The gutter and the stars

No, we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Lord Darlington, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Third Act

This one sits on posters, but on stage it is said in a room full of men drinking at midnight, and nobody is moved. Dumby repeats it back as a question and adds, Upon my word, you are very romantic to-night, Darlington. Wilde writes the beautiful line and the mockery of it in the same breath.

7. Cecil Graham on sentimentalists

And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

Cecil Graham, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Third Act

A few lines earlier Graham asks what a cynic is, and Darlington answers with the price-of-everything line Wilde had already given Lord Henry in Dorian Gray. Graham’s reply is the less quoted half, and it is sharper, because it lands on Darlington, who has just confessed to being in love.

A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband

8. Lord Illingworth on fox hunting

The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.

Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, First Act

The guests on the terrace at Hunstanton Chase are talking about health, a word Mrs. Allonby calls horrid and Illingworth calls the silliest in the language. The fox line is his illustration. The play opened at the Haymarket on April 19th, 1893, the Gutenberg edition records, and Illingworth is its most charming character and its villain.

9. Children and their parents

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

Lord Illingworth, A Woman of No Importance, Second Act

Illingworth says this to Mrs. Arbuthnot, the woman he abandoned, about the son she raised alone: he is threatening her. In the Fourth Act she throws the same three sentences back at him, almost word for word, when the son has turned on his father instead. It is one of the few times Wilde lets a clever line change hands and change meaning.

10. Lord Goring on self-love

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, Phipps.

Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Third Act

Goring has come into his library in evening dress and is lecturing his butler, whom the stage directions call a mask with a manner, and who answers every remark with Yes, my lord. The comedy is in the name at the end: an epigram wasted on the one man in London paid not to react. An Ideal Husband opened at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on January 3rd, 1895, the cast page of the Gutenberg text notes, six weeks before Earnest.

Oscar Wilde quotes from the essays and De Profundis

The essays in Intentions, which the Gutenberg edition dates to 1891, are mostly dialogues, so even here someone other than Wilde is talking.

11. Life imitates Art

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

Vivian, “The Decay of Lying”, in Intentions

Vivian reads his essay aloud to his friend Cyril, and his best example is the London fog, which he says nobody saw until poets and painters taught them to. Then he undercuts himself: Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold. If you like that idea, it is worth trying on a real canvas; our guide to how to look at a painting is a good place to start.

12. The mask

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Gilbert, “The Critic as Artist”, Part II, in Intentions

Gilbert is explaining why Shakespeare reveals himself more completely in his plays than in his sonnets. It is the key to reading Wilde, too, which is why this list keeps naming speakers: the lines that sound most like his creed were usually handed to Lord Darlington or Lady Bracknell.

13. A map without Utopia

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.

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

Here, for once, Wilde speaks plainly. The essay, reprinted in the Gutenberg text from the Fortnightly Review, argues that machines should do the dull work so that people can become individuals. He has just imagined great storages of force for every city, and anticipates the obvious objection. The sentence goes on: when Humanity lands, it sees a better country and sets sail again.

14. Other people

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Written from prison, and it shows: the old paradox has been turned on the self. Wilde gets to it through Emerson, whom he quotes in the sentence before. Their passions a quotation is an uncomfortable line to meet on a quotes page. The same letter contains a plainer one, Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

Quick reference: where each line comes from

A line you will not find here

The Wilde quote people search for most, Be yourself; everyone else is already taken, is not in any of the texts above. We traced it on a separate page, did Oscar Wilde say “be yourself”? For more writers on books and the people who read them, see quotes about reading, from the books themselves.

One last detail worth knowing before you go to De Profundis: the Gutenberg text follows the 1913 Methuen edition, and its own credits warn that later editions contained more material. The letter most people quote is a shortened one.

Sources

• Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Project Gutenberg #844
• Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Project Gutenberg #790
• Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, Project Gutenberg #854
• Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, Project Gutenberg #885
• Oscar Wilde, Intentions (“The Decay of Lying”, “The Critic as Artist”), Project Gutenberg #887
• Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism, Project Gutenberg #1017
• Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, Project Gutenberg #921