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“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” It is on mugs, graduation cards and a million profile bios, and it is almost always signed Oscar Wilde. There is no evidence he wrote it. The line does not appear in his plays, his essays, his letters or his recorded conversation, and it is missing from the standard collections of his wit. The earliest printed copy anyone has been able to find dates from 1999 — ninety-nine years after Wilde died. Whoever first said it, it was not him.
The strange part is what he actually did write about being yourself. It is sharper, sadder, and a good deal more useful than the mug.
Where the line actually turns up first
The most careful work on this saying has been done by Quote Investigator, a research site that tracks sayings back through printed and digital records. Its earliest strong match is an online message posted on 27 December 1999, to a discussion group used mostly by readers in the Netherlands. The sentence sits there in quotation marks with no author’s name attached to it at all.
After that, the trail gets stranger rather than clearer. In 2000 and 2001 the line turns up credited not to Wilde but to a Gilbert Perreira — a name that means nothing to almost anyone, and about whom nothing much is known. Around the same time the home-improvement chain Menards ran “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken” in newspaper advertising supplements, with nobody’s name on it. By Christmas 2002 a weekly paper in Fort Wayne was printing it as “Be yourself (everyone else is taken anyway).”
That drift is the fingerprint of a saying that came from everybody. A line that comes out of a book keeps its wording. A line that comes out of the air gets shorter, loses its punctuation, picks up stray words, and eventually picks up a famous signature.
Here is the detail that does the most work. The sentence is not in The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, the 1996 collection edited by the quotation expert Ralph Keyes. A thorough gathering of Wilde’s best lines, assembled three years before the saying appears in print anywhere, and it simply is not in there.
Researchers do not entirely agree about where it came from, and that disagreement is worth knowing about. In 1967 the American monk Thomas Merton published an essay called “Day of a Stranger” in the literary journal The Hudson Review. In it he wrote: “In an age where there is much talk about ‘being yourself’ I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself.” He added that there was, in any case, very little chance of his being anybody else. Some researchers think the modern saying is Merton’s thought worn smooth by thirty years of retelling. Quote Investigator is more cautious and calls it an overlap in meaning rather than the same sentence. Both readings are reasonable. Neither of them is Wilde.
So the honest answer is not “Wilde definitely never said it” — you cannot prove that about any sentence, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. The answer is this: nobody has found it in anything he wrote or said, the people who have looked hardest report it is not there, and the oldest copy anyone can produce comes from a century after his death. That is as close to settled as quote history gets. The same thing happened to “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil”, which spent a century with Edmund Burke’s name on it.
What Oscar Wilde actually wrote about being yourself
Wilde wrote about the self constantly. He just did not think it was lying around waiting to be picked up.
In “The Critic as Artist,” one of the essays in his 1891 collection Intentions, two characters spend a long evening arguing, and one of them says this: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Set that beside the mug. The mug says the self is available — yours, in stock, nobody else has claimed it. Wilde says the self is the hardest thing in the world to get at, and that people are often most truthful when they are least exposed: in a costume, in a character, behind something.
Then there is the other one, and it was written in prison.
In 1897 Wilde was serving two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol. He wrote a long letter there that was published in 1905, five years after his death, under the title De Profundis — Latin for “out of the depths.” Partway through, he quotes Emerson saying that nothing is rarer in any man than an act of his own, agrees with him, and keeps going:
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
A man whose name now gets stamped on a quotation he never wrote once observed that most people’s passions are a quotation. It is difficult to improve on that.
Why the difference is worth knowing
“Be yourself” is advice we hand to people who are struggling, and it is kinder than it is useful. It assumes the missing piece is permission. For a lot of people the missing piece is the question underneath it: which self? The one at work, the one at home, the one who shows up when nobody needs anything? If you have ever been told to be yourself and felt a small flare of panic instead of relief, you were not being difficult. You had noticed that the sentence hands you the entire weight and assures you the answer is already in the box.
Wilde noticed the same gap from a prison cell, and he did not stop at the diagnosis. The sentence that comes immediately after “their passions a quotation” is the one nobody prints:
“Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but he was the first individualist in history.”
That is Wilde’s own line, written at the bottom of his life, and it is a genuinely surprising thing for him to have put on paper. He is saying that the person in history who most completely was himself was Jesus. Whatever a reader makes of that, notice what it does structurally: it points away from the reader instead of back at them. It names a particular life and says, that is what the thing you are reaching for actually looks like.
And when Jesus talks about the self, the instruction runs almost opposite to the poster: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). Not hold on tighter to yourself. Let go, and be handed one back. If that is the knot you keep circling, this look at identity that is not built on performance stays with it longer than we can here.
Almost everybody believed it was Wilde
That includes people who have read Wilde properly, and it includes us. The attribution is baked so deep into the internet that if you looked it up ten years ago you were told Wilde, confidently, by every site you checked — and that was the best answer available at the time. Believing it was never a failure of attention. It was trust in a signature that had been copied a million times before it reached you.
And nothing about the correction spoils the advice. “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken” is still a decent thing to say to a frightened sixteen-year-old. It just belongs to all of us now rather than to one famous man. Meanwhile the man it was lent to left behind something better, written in the worst year he ever had: that most of us are living on borrowed material, and that there is a way out of that.
A Question Worth Sitting With
Which saying have you always assumed came from a famous author — or straight out of the Bible — and only later started to wonder about? Tell us in the comments. The ones readers name here are usually the next ones we go and check.
If This Got You Thinking, Pass It On
- “Just learned that ‘be yourself; everyone else is already taken’ is not Oscar Wilde. Earliest copy anyone can find in print: 1999. He died in 1900.”
- “Wilde never wrote ‘be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’ What he did write, from a prison cell: ‘Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’ Harsher. Also truer.”
- “The man whose name keeps getting stamped on a quote he never said once wrote that most people’s passions are a quotation. I am going to be thinking about that all week.”
Questions People Ask
Did Oscar Wilde say “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”?
There is no evidence that Oscar Wilde said or wrote “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” The line does not appear in his plays, essays, letters or recorded conversation, and it is absent from The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, the 1996 collection edited by the quotation expert Ralph Keyes. The earliest printed version quote researchers have located is an anonymous online message from December 1999 — ninety-nine years after Wilde died in 1900.
Who really said “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken”?
Nobody knows who first said “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken,” and that is the honest answer rather than a dodge. The earliest known appearance, from December 1999, carries no author’s name. In 2000 and 2001 the line was credited to a Gilbert Perreira, about whom little is known. Some researchers point to a 1967 essay by the monk Thomas Merton, who wrote about the talk of “being yourself” in similar terms, but the wording is different and the link is unproven. The saying also circulates as “be yourself, everyone else is taken” and “be yourself, everyone else is taken anyway.”
What did Oscar Wilde actually write about being yourself?
Oscar Wilde wrote about the self often, and far less reassuringly than the saying pinned to him. In “The Critic as Artist,” collected in Intentions (1891), he has a character say: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” And in De Profundis, the long letter he wrote in Reading Gaol in 1897 and which was published in 1905 after his death, he wrote: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
Is “be yourself, everyone else is taken” in the Bible?
No — “be yourself, everyone else is taken” is not in the Bible in any form or wording. The nearest the Bible comes to the subject is close to the opposite instruction. In Matthew 16:25 Jesus says, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it,” which treats a life as something received rather than something gripped.
Why do so many quotes get attributed to Oscar Wilde?
Memorable one-line sayings tend to drift toward whoever is already famous for memorable one-line sayings, and Oscar Wilde is one of the largest magnets in the English language. Researchers who track misquotation find the same pattern forming around Mark Twain, Albert Einstein and C.S. Lewis — the line “you don’t have a soul, you are a soul” is credited to Lewis everywhere and is not his either. Once a saying and a signature have travelled together for a few years, people stop checking, because there is nothing visibly wrong to check.
