To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most…

The lines come from “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, in the part where Wilde argues that private property has crushed individualism. The rich merchant is “at every moment of his life at the mercy of things that are not under his control”: a change in the wind may sink his ship. “Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has, is what is in him.” With property abolished, nobody will waste his life “in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live.” Then comes the line, followed by the reflection that we have never seen the full expression of a personality except in art.

Wilde published the essay in the Fortnightly Review in February 1891, the year of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Its socialism is his own: not equality but the freedom of everyone to be an artist of his own life.

The line is now quoted alone, as a call to live intensely, without its political frame.

The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work