Browse 9 quotations connecting Oscar Wilde with Words of Wisdom, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Sources represented here include Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1890 magazine text, The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition.
“I can resist everything except temptation.”
The paradox makes weakness sound like strength and exposes how easily people invent exceptions to their own principles.
Lady Windermere’s Fan.
“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.
Lady Windermere’s Fan.
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
The line contrasts difficult circumstances with the direction of attention, leaving room for aspiration without denying hardship.
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Third Act, Project Gutenberg #790. Lord Darlington says that all are in the gutter but some look at the stars during ironic banter about vice, virtue and his love for a married woman. It is comic dramatic dialogue, not Oscar Wilde autobiography or a context-free motivational doctrine.
“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.
The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I; Algernon Moncrieff. Exact catalog wording is preserved in the scan-backed Samuel French acting text on Wikisource, scan leaf 14 / printed page 12. The acting-text witness is abridged elsewhere, so this record is bound only to its independently verified page.
“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.
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.
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.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 Lippincott magazine text, Chapter 1; Lord Henry gives the reputation paradox while discussing Basil Hallward’s portrait.
“To define is to limit.”
Definitions clarify ideas but can also narrow them, especially when a label is treated as the complete reality of a person or experience.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 17; Lord Henry answers the Duchess of Monmouth’s question “What are you?” with “To define is to limit.”
“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.
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.
