Browse 22 quotations connecting Oscar Wilde with Funny, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition, An Ideal Husband. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition, An Ideal Husband.
“When one is in love one begins by deceiving oneself. And one ends by deceiving others.”
The line turns romance into a two-stage comedy of self-deception and social deception, exaggerating cynicism to expose how desire distorts judgment.
Source note: A Woman of No Importance, Act III; Lord Illingworth answers Gerald’s question about love with the romance/self-deception epigram. The exact catalog wording is supported by this play, not by The Picture of Dorian Gray.
“The only possible society is oneself.”
The comic exaggeration makes self-company part of Wilde’s joke about society while still centering comfort with oneself.
Source note: An Ideal Husband, Act III, spoken by Lord Goring immediately before the lifelong-romance line.
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
The line playfully treats self-acceptance not as a one-time achievement but as a relationship that lasts throughout life.
Source note: An Ideal Husband, Act 3; Lord Goring delivers the lifelong-romance epigram in Wilde’s social comedy, where self-regard is framed through deliberate wit.
“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
The paradox mocks social performance: even “being natural” can become a carefully maintained pose when people are conscious of appearances.
Source note: An Ideal Husband; Lord Goring turns naturalness itself into a social pose.
“I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.”
The line makes conversation comic by combining cheerful self-deprecation with a claim of expertise in precisely nothing.
Source note: An Ideal Husband; Lord Goring jokes with his father about the subjects he is qualified to discuss.
“I can resist everything except temptation.”
The paradox makes weakness sound like strength and exposes how easily people invent exceptions to their own principles.
Source note: Lady Windermere’s Fan.
“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
The epigram turns a flattering word into a comic rebrand for error, suggesting that experience often arrives only after something has gone wrong.
Source note: Lady Windermere’s Fan; a characteristic Wildean epigram linking experience and mistakes.
“Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.”
Wilde uses deliberate contradiction to suggest that solemnity is not the only way to take life seriously.
Source note: Lady Windermere’s Fan.
“The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.”
The epigram compresses three stereotypes of certainty into one balanced joke, mocking credulity, suspicion, and youthful overconfidence at once.
Source note: “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” first published in The Chameleon in 1894.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
Wilde resists neat moral simplification by reminding the reader that truth often arrives mixed with context and contradiction.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1; Algernon delivers the purity-and-simplicity line as a comic epigram during the play’s conversation about truth and social performance.
“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”
The complaint is funny because it treats cleverness—normally a compliment—as an exhausting social excess that has become unfashionably common.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest; Algernon complains about the fashionable performance of cleverness.
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
Miss Prism reduces fiction to a deliberately simplistic moral formula, and the neat certainty is precisely what makes the line comic.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 2; Miss Prism describes the plot of her lost novel.
“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune—to lose both seems like carelessness.”
Lady Bracknell’s absurdly bureaucratic response turns tragedy into a social failing, which is funny because her concern for status overwhelms ordinary sympathy.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1; Lady Bracknell reacts to Jack’s uncertain parentage.
“I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.”
Cecily reverses the conventional preference for happy endings, turning literary taste into a compact joke about boredom and expectation.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 2; Cecily responds while Miss Prism discusses her novel.
“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
The line is a deliberately seductive paradox rather than practical advice, expressing the character’s philosophy of appetite and indulgence.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 Lippincott magazine text, Chapter 2; Lord Henry states the temptation paradox while influencing Dorian in Basil Hallward’s garden.
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
The distinction between price and value criticizes a way of thinking that can measure cost while missing significance.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 Lippincott magazine text, Chapter 3; Lord Henry gives the price-and-value epigram after describing a bargain for old brocade.
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
The joke exposes the appetite for attention by suggesting that even negative notice can seem preferable to complete social invisibility.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 Lippincott magazine text, Chapter 1; Lord Henry gives the reputation paradox while discussing Basil Hallward’s portrait.
“All art is quite useless.”
The deliberately shocking ending to the preface argues for art’s independence from practical utility, forcing the reader to ask what aesthetic value means.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Preface; the final aphorism of Wilde’s aesthetic manifesto.
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.”
Wilde shifts judgment away from a book’s supposed moral category and toward artistic execution, a deliberately provocative defense of aesthetic criticism.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Preface; one of Wilde’s epigrams about art and books.
“Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
The clipped conclusion makes Wilde’s aesthetic argument memorable by reducing a complicated moral debate to the quality of the writing itself.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Preface; immediately follows the statement rejecting moral and immoral categories for books.
“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”
The wit turns “experience” into a retrospective label for errors, suggesting that mistakes become useful only when understood.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 4; third-person narration focalized through Lord Henry reflects that experience is the name people give to their mistakes.
“I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
Lord Henry pushes his preference for people over abstract morality into deliberate absurdity, making provocation itself part of the humor.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 1; Lord Henry tells Basil that he likes persons better than principles and extends the joke to people with no principles.