I can resist everything except temptation.

On the afternoon of her birthday ball, Lord Darlington calls on Lady Windermere in her morning-room and flirts with her. She has just said that women who have done wrong should never be forgiven and that she allows no exceptions; he calls her ‘a fascinating Puritan’, she objects to the adjective, and he excuses himself with this line. She answers that he has ‘the modern affectation of weakness’. Darlington is in love with her, and by the end of the next act he is urging her to leave her husband for him.

A joke against the moralist’s idea of willpower: the one thing you are supposed to resist is the one thing you can’t. Darlington uses it to excuse a compliment, and to hint that he is not a man of rules.

Usually quoted as Wilde’s own confession of weakness, or as a cheerful motto for indulgence. On stage it is a would-be seducer’s flirtatious excuse, and Lady Windermere at once calls it an affectation. The play goes on to test her own rule that the fallen should never be forgiven.

• A misquotationI can resist anything except temptation. The commonest form on mugs, posters and in quote collections: ‘anything’ for ‘everything’.

Morality

• The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
• Life is too important to be taken seriously. (paraphrase)
• Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.
• I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
• I had the radio on. Marilyn Monroe

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), Act I. Spoken by Lord Darlington. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/resist-everything-except-temptation/ (31 October 2026).

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