Oscar Wilde? Felix Grendon? Percy Colson? Walter Winchell? Reader’s Digest? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: A well-known moral injunction states that one should forgive one’s enemies. A humorous twist suggests that one should grant forgiveness because it produces annoyance in one’s adversaries. This notion has been attributed to the famous wit Oscar Wilde. Would you please explore this topic?
Reply from Quote Investigator: Oscar Wilde died in 1900, and QI has found no substantive evidence that he originated this quip. It is not listed in researcher Ralph Keyes’s important compilation “The Wit & Wisdom of Oscar Wilde”.1 Also, the joke does not occur in the 2006 compendium “Oscar Wilde in Quotation: 3,100 Insults, Anecdotes, and Aphorisms”.2
The earliest close match known to QI appeared in a collection of precepts for the young constructed by septuagenarian U.K. author Percy Colson which were printed in “The Sketch” newspaper of London in April 1949. Here were three items from the set. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:3
“It is only the very dull who enjoy practical jokes.”
“Where there is universal equality, there can be no quality.”
“Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so intensely.”
QI tentatively credits Percy Colson with this saying. “The Sketch” newspaper mentioned that Colson was the co-author of a forthcoming book titled “Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas”. Perhaps Colson’s authorship of this book about Wilde caused confusion. A few years later, in June 1954, credit for the quotation was reassigned to Wilde in the pages of the “Reader’s Digest”.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
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