Oscar Wilde

1854 – 1900

1800s Ireland & England · Writer

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer famous for his witty plays, clever sayings, and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He loved to turn ordinary sentences upside down to make people laugh and think at the same time. He remains one of the most quoted writers in the English language.

Quotes

9

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

“'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, 'Be thyself' shall be written.”

“I have many beautiful flowers, but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all.”

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

“I must learn how to be happy.”

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”

“Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.”

“It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.”

Sources

en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia's article on Oscar Wilde. Not yet checked against the books it cites.
Added 20 Aug 2026 · claude-sonnet-5

How this life story was put together

Put together from what’s generally known about Oscar Wilde, not from the sources above. The dates and details haven’t been checked against them yet.