I Can Resist Everything Except Temptation

Spoken by Lord Darlington in Act I of Lady Windermere's Fan, which premiered at St. James's Theatre in London on February 20, 1892, becoming Wilde's first major theatrical success. The line is delivered after Lady Windermere tells Darlington he has "the modern affectation of weakness." The paradox was a deliberate inversion of Victorian moral earnestness — Wilde used Lord Darlington to voice a philosophy of hedonistic honesty that punctured the era's rhetoric of self-denial.