Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish playwright, poet and author. Known for his wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. Several of his plays continue to be widely performed, especially The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” and fell from popularity. On his release from prison, he went to France and never returned to Ireland or Britain. He died in poverty.

Here are Oscar Wilde’s best quotes as determined by BQOTD.com.

Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

I am not young enough to know everything.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

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.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

I don’t want to go to heaven. None of my friends are there.

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.

Who, being loved, is poor?

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

For more quotes from this author, visit the Oscar Wilde Author Page for a more extensive listing.