Author Quotes
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
— The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
From Wilde's political essay advocating individualism. The distinction between existing and living is central to his aesthetic philosophy — mere survival is not enough.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
— Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
Spoken by Lord Darlington in Act III. One of Wilde's most quoted lines — an acknowledgment of shared wretchedness alongside the refusal to surrender aspiration.
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
— The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Lord Henry's advice to Dorian in Chapter 2. The line encapsulates the novel's central theme: the seductive danger of unchecked hedonism.
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
— The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
From the novel's opening chapter. Basil Hallward reveals the autobiographical nature of all art — the creator cannot help but expose themselves.
“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”
— Remark to US customs, as reported by newspapers (1882)
Reportedly said at New York customs on his 1882 American lecture tour. Whether apocryphal or not, the line became inseparable from Wilde's public persona.
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
— The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Another of Lord Henry's epigrammatic pronouncements. Wilde inverts the conventional wisdom that experience equals wisdom.