Quote of the Day: Oscar Wilde on Daily Inspiration

Notice Wilde’s choice of “taken” rather than “claimed” or “occupied.” “Taken” is brisk, almost transactional, like the best seats are gone, the reservation is under someone else’s name. It makes imitation feel not merely misguided but impossible, which is exactly the snap in: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

Under the joke sits a hard truth about identity in public life. We copy because it feels safer: adopt the accent, the posture, the politics, the curated preferences that earn quick approval. But borrowed selves come with fine print. The more you perform a role designed by someone else, trend, parent, algorithm, the more you outsource your own judgment, and the more your days start sounding like a script you didn’t write.

Wilde’s line isn’t a permission slip for selfishness; it’s an argument for scarcity. There is exactly one vantage point from which you see your life, one set of instincts that can’t be replicated, one particular mix of tenderness and nerve that only you bring to a room. When you imitate, you don’t become the original, you become a faint photocopy, deprived of the very edges that might have made you interesting. Authenticity, in this sense, is not a brand; it’s a kind of civic contribution, a vote for a more various world.

Oscar Wilde earned his authority on this subject the hard way: as a master of wit and satire, he spent a career exposing social masks in his plays and novels, then paid dearly for refusing to live quietly behind one.

October invites reinvention, new routines, new ambitions, a fresh season of comparisons. Today, try a simpler practice: one small decision made for alignment rather than applause, one honest sentence said without varnish. That’s how courage becomes habit, and how freedom stops being an idea and starts being a life.