Article: Oscar Wilde Gifts — Only Lines He Actually Wrote
Oscar Wilde Gifts — Only Lines He Actually Wrote
For a sharp-tongued friend, give lines Oscar Wilde actually wrote: "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." (The Importance of Being Earnest, first staged 1895), "The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius." ("The Critic as Artist," first published 1890; collected in Intentions, 1891), or "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." (Pall Mall Gazette, 1885).
You know the friend. The one who says what the whole table was thinking, half a second before anyone else would dare. Dinner is better when they're there. So are arguments.
They deserve a Wilde line. They also deserve one he actually wrote.
Here's the catch. The Wilde line you see most often, "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken," isn't his. We traced where it really came from. Hand your sharpest friend a fake and they'll be the first to notice… and they'll never let it go.
So every line below comes with its receipts: the work, the year, and who says it. We checked each one against Wilde's own text before it went on anything.
Good gifts start with the person, not the product. So we've sorted these by the friend, not the format.
Model photo created with AI. The printed line is real.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895. Shop the tee →
For the friend who tells you the truth anyway
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
— Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I (first staged 1895)
You asked what they really thought. They told you. It wasn't the answer you were hoping for. You trusted them more for it.
Wilde gives the line to Algernon. His friend Jack has just finished explaining his double life and calls it "the whole truth pure and simple." Algernon won't have it, and he keeps going: "Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!"
The play opened at the St James's Theatre on February 14, 1895. Valentine's Day, for a comedy about people lying about who they are.
The painter W. Graham Robertson recalled that Wilde asked friends to wear green carnations to the 1892 opening of Lady Windermere’s Fan. Asked what it meant, Wilde said, “Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess.” (W. Graham Robertson, Time Was, 1931)
It's also on a full-zip hoodie and a phone case.
For the friend who's always three steps ahead of the room
"The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius."
— Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist" (first published 1890; collected in Intentions, 1891)
They had the idea two years before everyone caught up. They got the eye-rolls then. Someone else got the credit later. They're already onto the next thing.
"The Critic as Artist" is written as a conversation between two friends, Gilbert and Ernest. Ernest has just grumbled that the English public "always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it." Gilbert agrees with this line… then, in the very next breath, admits he likes all memoirs. The sharpest sentence in the room, tossed off on the way to something else. That's Wilde.
On the tee, “genius.” gets its own line, set large in gold. The rest of the sentence leads up to it, the way Gilbert does.
It's also on a sweatshirt and a mug.
For the friend who changed their mind — and isn't sorry
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative."
— Oscar Wilde, "The Relation of Dress to Art," Pall Mall Gazette (February 28, 1885)
They used to swear by one thing. Now it's another. Someone says, "But you always said…" and they just smile.
Wilde wrote it in a newspaper reply to a lecture by the painter James McNeill Whistler. He slipped it in right after teasing Whistler: "far be it from me to burden a butterfly with the heavy responsibility of its past." Then he points out that Whistler had painted English girls "in the fantastic dresses of Japan," a jab at the painter's own inconsistency.
So we made the word itself inconsistent. On the tee, no two letters of “Consistency” match: roman and italic, cream and gold. Wilde would have approved.
Model photo created with AI. The printed line is real.
"Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." Oscar Wilde, 1885. Shop the tee →
It's also on a sweatshirt.
Not sure which line is theirs?
Take Find Your Line and choose For someone else. Answer five quick questions with them in mind, and it'll point you to lines that might fit.
Or browse the Quote Library and wait for the line that makes you think, that's them. If they're a Wilde person through and through, start with The Best Oscar Wilde Quotes, each one traced to the work it came from.
If we can't verify it, we don't print it.
Questions we get
When do I need to order for Christmas?
Order by Thursday, November 26, for Christmas delivery.
Did Oscar Wilde really say "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken"?
No. Quote Investigator found no evidence that Wilde said or wrote it. The earliest exact match it found is an unattributed Usenet post from December 1999. Here's the full story.
How can I tell if an Oscar Wilde quote is real?
Look for a work, a year and, in the plays and dialogues, a speaker. All three lines in this post have them: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I (first staged 1895); "The Critic as Artist" (first published 1890; collected in Intentions, 1891); and the Pall Mall Gazette for February 28, 1885. We checked each against Wilde's original text.
Order by Nov 26 for Christmas delivery. Free shipping on orders over $50.
The Quoteiac Team: Posts with this byline are researched, written, and edited by different members of our team, each working from their own interests and strengths. Every quote is checked against its original source before it goes up.
