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

Oscar Wilde

Writers & Literary Figures

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, and wit whose works - 'The Picture of Dorian Gray,' 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' and 'De Profundis' - made him the most celebrated figure of the Aesthetic Movement. His trial and imprisonment for homosexuality transformed him from society's darling into a martyr for individual freedom.

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Source: The Soul of Man under SocialismVerified

Oscar Wilde's Other Quotes

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

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Related Quotes

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

-- Oscar Wilde

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

-- Virginia Woolf

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

-- Virginia Woolf

One must always be drunk. That is everything: the only question.

-- Charles Baudelaire

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

-- William Shakespeare

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

-- William Shakespeare