Between Glitter and Gutter

The subject of today's podcast, Oscar Wilde is extremely important because of his efforts in making wit an art form. His plays — such as The Importance of Being Earnest — are still laugh-out-loud funny more than a century later, which almost no other Victorian writer can claim. He exposed the hypocrisy and absurdity of his society with dazzling one-liners that still feel sharp in our own age of image-making and social performance.

But beyond the jokes, Wilde’s life gives him lasting weight. He lived boldly, at enormous personal risk, in an era when his sexuality was criminalized. His downfall — from London celebrity to prison — makes his art feel all the more courageous.

Transcript

The subject of today's podcast, Oscar Wilde is extremely important because of his efforts in making wit an art form. His plays — such as The Importance of Being Earnest — are still laugh-out-loud funny more than a century later, which almost no other Victorian writer can claim. He exposed the hypocrisy and absurdity of his society with dazzling one-liners that still feel sharp in our own age of image-making and social performance.

But beyond the jokes, Wilde’s life gives him lasting weight. He lived boldly, at enormous personal risk, in an era when his sexuality was criminalized. His downfall — from London celebrity to prison — makes his art feel all the more courageous.

In short: you should care about Wilde because he shows us that comedy can be serious, style can be substance, and that living authentically, even at a cost, can leave a cultural legacy that never goes out of fashion.

When you hear the name Oscar Wilde, what comes to mind?
Is it a glittering one-liner that makes you smile? Is it the flamboyant man in velvet jackets, walking through Victorian London with a sunflower in his lapel? Or is it tragedy—the story of a man destroyed by scandal, imprisoned for who he loved?  His plays, such as The   Importance of Being Earnest, are still laugh-out-loud funny more than a century later. He used comedy to expose hypocrisy, and his sparkling one-liners still feel sharp in our own age of social performance. But Wilde wasn’t just clever—he was courageous. He lived boldly in a time when his very identity was criminalized, and his fall from celebrity to prison gives his art a lasting poignancy. Wilde reminds us that comedy can be serious, style can be substance, and authenticity, even at a cost, leaves a legacy that never fades.”

Oscar Wilde was the wit who never stopped sparkling, the artist who turned his life into a performance, and the broken man who wrote some of his deepest words behind prison walls.

Today, let’s spend some time with both Wildes—the dazzling wit, and the tragic prisoner.

Oscar Wilde had a talent for turning words into fireworks. He once joked:
“I can resist everything except temptation.”

That line isn’t just funny—it’s philosophy. It’s Wilde telling us that pleasure, beauty, desire—they matter more than restraint.

He also said, “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.”
And he lived that advice. Wilde was a work of art. He wore velvet jackets, embroidered waistcoats, flowers in his buttonhole. He lectured across America on the value of beauty. He understood, long before Instagram, that an artist could curate not just their work, but their self.

Now, I would like to present some of Oscar Wilde’s wittiest lines from his stage productions in context - When it comes to theatrical wit, nobody sparkles quite like Oscar Wilde. His comedies are full of lines that have outlived the plays themselves — little verbal jewels that audiences still quote today. Let’s look at ten of the best.

1. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
From The Importance of Being Earnest. Algernon Moncrieff says this while teasing his friend Jack about his mysterious background. It’s classic Wilde: a moral cliché twisted into paradox, at once funny and slightly unsettling.

2. “I can resist everything except temptation.”
From Lady Windermere’s Fan. Lord Darlington, the witty dandy, makes this mock-confession. It’s a perfect contradiction — turning weakness into sophistication — and it’s no wonder it became one of Wilde’s most quoted lines.

3. “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Back to The Importance of Being Earnest. Lady Bracknell delivers this devastating line as she interrogates poor Jack about his origins. The severity of Victorian morality turned into absurdity — cruel, but hilarious.

4. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
From An Ideal Husband. Lord Goring, Wilde’s alter ego in this play, parodies romantic clichés by making narcissism sound positively noble.

5. “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
Also from Lady Windermere’s Fan. Again Lord Darlington, breezily reframing failure as wisdom. It’s stylish philosophy that makes a blunder feel almost glamorous.

6. “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
From The Importance of Being Earnest. Gwendolen Fairfax declares this while talking about marriage proposals. It’s Wilde at his sharpest: surface elevated above substance, and appearances reigning supreme.

7. “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
From A Woman of No Importance. Lord Illingworth delivers this paradox with his usual smoothness. It turns judgment upside down — worldly, forgiving, and slyly hopeful all at once.

8. “After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
Also from A Woman of No Importance. Another Illingworth gem. A joke about the healing powers of food, but also a jab at family obligations — the kind that never quite go away.

9. “There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
From An Ideal Husband. Lord Goring again, capturing human dissatisfaction in one neat epigram. Funny, but painfully true.

10. “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.”
Finally, back to Lady Windermere’s Fan. Lord Darlington again, with what might be Wilde’s whole philosophy in miniature. Frivolity as salvation, seriousness as the true danger.

Taken together, these lines show Wilde’s genius for epigram: the witty inversion, the dazzling paradox, the joke that makes you laugh and wince at the same time. His plays may have been written for Victorian drawing rooms, but his wit still feels alive today — playful, sharp, and never, ever simple.

   So, taken together: Wilde distributes his best lines among the dandies (Darlington, Goring, Algernon) and the formidable authority figures (Lady Bracknell, Illingworth, Gwendolen). The wit works because it’s embedded in their social games.

Note these additional 10 brief quotes of Oscar Wilde’s many witty sayings

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

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

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. 

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

Ah! Don't say you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

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

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.

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

With that last witticism, Oscar Wilde could have been defining an online influencer - and this was before computers became common place.

No, Oscar Wilde wasn’t afraid to shock Victorian society. He delighted in pointing out its hypocrisies. In his play The Importance of Being Earnest, one character says:

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

That line still gets laughs today, but it’s also a sharp needle in the balloon of Victorian morality. Wilde was showing that beneath all the stiff collars and polished manners, people were complicated, messy, and far from pure.

And his wit refuses to age. Think about this one:
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
It’s almost as if Wilde was writing inspirational posters a hundred years before Etsy.

In Wilde’s first half of life, everything glittered. He was the toast of London, the center of conversation, the man whose plays sold out and whose wit dazzled.

But then the curtain came down.

Transition MINOR music

Wilde once quipped: “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.”
But eventually, life forced him to speak seriously.

The second half of Wilde’s story is not about comedy—it’s about tragedy.

Oscar Wilde loved a young man named Lord Alfred Douglas. Their relationship was passionate, volatile, and very public. Victorian society tolerated Wilde’s flamboyance—until it didn’t. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, accused Wilde of “posing as a sodomite.” Wilde sued him for libel - not that brighter thing to do, because it is said that the mark of Queensberry could be incredibly vindictive.

Not surprisingly, the trial backfired. Evidence of Wilde’s relationships with men came to light. The dazzling wit who had entertained society became its scapegoat. In 1895, Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency” and sentenced to two years of hard labor.

In prison, Wilde’s life unraveled. His health broke. His spirit bent. But his words—his words deepened.

From his cell, he wrote De Profundis—Latin for “From the Depths.” It is part love letter, part spiritual meditation, part cry of anguish. In it, Wilde reflects on suffering, betrayal, and the need to rebuild one’s soul through pain. It is the opposite of his glittering epigrams—it is raw, confessional, vulnerable.

Compare some of the sentiments from De Profundis to his earlier witticisms - 
Hearts are made to be broken.”

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

“The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.”

“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”

“The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.”

“Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

“Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster's scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.”

“Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.”

“It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little. I discern great sanity in the Greek attitude. They never chattered about sunsets, or discussed whether the shadows on the grass were really mauve or not. But they saw that the sea was for the swimmer, and the sand for the feet of the runner. They loved the trees for the shadow that they cast, and the forest for its silence at noon.”

“A sentimentalist is simply one who wants to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. The intellectual and emotional life of ordinary people is a very contemptible affair. Just as they borrow their ideas from a sort of circulating library of thought - and send them back soiled at the end of each week, so they always try to get their emotions on credit, and refuse to pay the bill when it comes in. You should pass out of that conception of life. As soon as you have to pay for an emotion you will know its quality, and be the better for such knowledge. And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed, sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.”

“Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little often share.”

“To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”

“Nature....she will hang the night stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send word the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”

“Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of man.”

The aim of love is to love: no more, and no less.

And after prison came The Ballad of Reading Gaol - the poem explores themes of capital punishment, imprisonment, and the destructive nature of human actions, famously including the lines: "Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard…” in the poem, Wilde gave voice not just to himself but to every prisoner:
Note the sections from the ballad of Reading jail -

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.

But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.

This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

And

In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.

And there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.

Gone is the sparkling wit. In its place is compassion, a sense of universal human frailty. Wilde had become a prophet of pain.

Because he was two men at once.
The dazzling wit who could make a drawing room collapse with laughter.
And the tragic poet who wrote from the depths of a prison cell.

Note how the Oscar Wilde’s observational quotes from this period are still witty in nature, but have a much, much darker tone.

He reminds us that art can be playful and profound, sometimes in the same sentence. That laughter can reveal truth, and that suffering can deepen it.

Maybe it’s best to close with Wilde himself. He once wrote:
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Oscar Wilde lived in both places—the gutter and the stars.
And that’s why, more than a century later, we’re still listening.

Join celebrate creativity for the next episode, where we look at America's greatest playwright, Eugene O'Neill. 

And thank you for listening to celebrate creativity.