Daily Inspiration Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde turns self-knowledge into a flirtation with narcissism, then undercuts it with a wink. "The only person in the world" sounds grandiose, even solipsistic, but the verb choice - "should like" - softens the claim into preference rather than doctrine. He isnt declaring that other people are unworthy; he is admitting, with characteristic perversity, that intimacy is easiest where the risks are lowest: inside the self, where one can curate the evidence and control the interpretation.

The line works because it stages a paradox at the heart of Wildean style. Victorian culture preached moral self-scrutiny, but it also demanded performance: respectability as a public costume. Wilde, a professional maker of masks, hints that thorough knowledge is less a pious achievement than a dangerous luxury. To know someone "thoroughly" is to confront the parts that dont fit the approved narrative - the appetites, vanities, contradictions. By choosing himself as the only suitable subject, he both boasts and confesses: he suspects that thoroughness is intolerable in ordinary social relations, where people depend on mutual illusions to keep the machinery of politeness running.

There is also a shadow biography in the line. Wilde lived at the junction of celebrity and scandal, praised for surface brilliance and punished for private desire. The quote reads like a preemptive retreat from a world eager to misunderstand him, and a sly insistence that the deepest truth of a person is neither courtroom fact nor drawing-room gossip. Its a sentence that flatters the speaker while quietly indicting the society that makes honest knowing feel impossible.