I can resist everything except temptation.
Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere's Fan, Act I (1892)
Source checked by an editor
When and why it was written
- When
- First performed in 1892.
- Why
- Lord Darlington again, deflecting a question about his own character.
What it means
The sentence performs its own subject. It offers the form of self-knowledge and uses it to avoid being known.
Wilde's paradoxes work by conceding the charge so charmingly that the concession functions as a defence. Read as confession it is honest. Read as tactic it is evasion. Both are correct.
Our reading of the passage cited above, not a quotation from a commentary.
Read the source
Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892
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