Experience Is Merely The Name Men

Spoken by Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Wilde's only novel. Lord Henry is the book's cynical aphorist, and the line is part of his worldview that experience is inseparable from moral failure. A longer version runs: "Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes." The novel was first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890 and caused a scandal in Victorian England for its perceived celebration of hedonism and its coded treatment of same-sex attraction.