447)Īs you know, Oscar Wilde is one of history’s greatest quote magnets, and something as profound and witty as “Be Yourself Everyone Else is Taken” was almost bound to be attached to him eventually.īut if Oscar didn’t say it who did? The history of this quotation is complicated, Buzzkillers, and no one person is solely responsible for it. (“The True Function and Value of Criticism With Some Remarks On the Importance of Doing Nothing: A Dialogue,” The Nineteenth Century, The Nineteenth Century (A Monthly Review), Volume 28, p. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Wilde had expressed it more succinctly in 1890, when he wrote: Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. In De Profundis, often thought of as his greatest work, Wilde said: For the most part, he discussed this in terms of “being natural” and the tendency for people to wear masks to conceal the way they really are.
There are dozens of these legitimate Oscar-isms, but there’s no evidence that he ever said “Be Yourself Everyone Else is Taken.” Indeed, Wilde dropped epigrams about personal identity into the dialog of some of his novels and plays, as well as referring to it (often obliquely) in essays. (Quoted by Alvin Redman in The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde, 1952.)Īnybody can make history. Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
(“The Relation of Dress to Art,” The Pall Mall Gazette, February 28, 1885.) It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.Ĭonsistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. Dripping with epigrams, Oscar entertained literary circles in London, Paris and Dublin with his wit, often pairing philosophical and comical themes to excellent effect. Ah, Buzzkillers, good old Oscar Wilde, the author of so many excellent plays, novels, and poems.
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