4 quotations linked to Lady Windermere’s Fan by or associated with Oscar Wilde, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Reputation, temptation, experience, aspiration, seriousness, social judgment and Wilde’s characteristic comic reversal of conventional moral language.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or 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.
“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.
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.
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.
