In their own words

Oscar Wilde quotes

38 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Oscar Wilde wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around. Page 1 of 2.

How these quotes were checked

How we decide whether a quote is genuine

Oscar Wilde may be the most quoted writer in English after Shakespeare, and he is certainly among the most misquoted. A line enters this collection only when its wording has been checked against a printed text — his plays, novel, and essays in their Project Gutenberg editions, his published aphorisms, and the shorthand report of his 1895 trial testimony.

Because Wilde gave his best lines to invented people, this collection also says who speaks each one. A sentence delivered by Lord Henry Wotton or Lord Darlington is credited to its play or novel and its speaker, not presented as something Wilde said over dinner. Famous wordings that fail the check are listed below with what the evidence shows.

Four famous Hemingway quotes, fact-checked

A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.

Misattributed

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

The most shared “Wilde” line of all has no source in his works, letters, or recorded conversation. Quote Investigator finds nothing close to it before the twentieth century's end; its earliest known appearances are from the 1990s onward, and the attribution to Wilde arrived with social media. Wilde's documented position was closer to the opposite — the Phrases and Philosophies aphorism that opens this collection calls artifice the first duty in life.

— Garson O'Toole, Be Yourself; Everyone Else Is Already Taken (2014)

Reported speech

“I have nothing to declare except my genius.”

Said to have been Wilde's answer to a New York customs officer in January 1882. No contemporary account of the landing records it; the sentence first appears in print decades later, in twentieth-century biographies — Frank Harris's 1918 life prints it as “his phrase to the Revenue officers on landing.” It may preserve something Wilde really said, but the only evidence is anecdote written long after the fact, by a biographer famous for improving his material.

— Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (1918)

Verified

“When good Americans die they go to Paris.”

The line really is in Wilde — twice — but both times his characters quote it as an existing saying: “They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris” in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Mrs. Allonby's “They say, Lady Hunstanton…” in A Woman of No Importance. The quip was already in print in 1858, when Oliver Wendell Holmes recorded it in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table as “that other saying of one of the wittiest of men.” Wilde gave it its stage, not its birth.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858)

Verified

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

Genuine twice over. Gwendolen says it in the third act of The Importance of Being Earnest, and Wilde had published the aphorism in his own voice a year earlier in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young — where it runs both ways: in all unimportant matters and in all important matters alike, style, not sincerity, is the essential.

— Oscar Wilde, edited by Robert Ross, Miscellanies (1908)

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.