Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend's success
Written byOscar Wilde1854–1900 · Irish poet, playwright and essayist
Wilde wrote the sentence in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, his long essay in the Fortnightly Review for February 1891. The wording above is the full original, individualist clause and all — it is the famous short version, not this one, that has been altered.
“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend's success” Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," Fortnightly Review, February 1891.
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Provenance
The source
Work
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
First published
Fortnightly Review, new series vol. 49, no. 290 (February 1891), pp. 292–319
Author
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
Manuscript
59 autograph pages, dated 1890, the printer’s copy — Berg Collection, New York Public Library
The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness. Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success. In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.
Fortnightly Review, February 1891
The two sentences before and the sentence after are quoted as they stand in the February 1891 Fortnightly Review text on Wikisource ↗.
The essay ran in the Fortnightly Review for February 1891 ↗, and the sentence is there in the original magazine text, sitting directly after “The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness.”
An annotated bibliography of Wilde’s manuscripts ↗ records the printer’s copy — 59 pages in Wilde’s hand, dated 1890, now in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library — and states that the differences between the 1891 magazine text and the 1895 private printing run only to spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and the dropping of the magazine’s italic emphasis.
The essay was first published in the Fortnightly Review in February 1891 and its author died in 1900, so both the work and this sentence are long out of copyright in the United States. Project Gutenberg ↗ distributes the full text on that basis.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What gets it wrong
The attribution is right. The quotation usually is not — Wilde’s sentence has a hinge in the middle that almost every version online cuts out, and the clause that goes missing is the one that connects the line to the essay it comes from.
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The famous short formOscar Wilde, trimmed Mis-worded
“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success” is the version on Goodreads ↗, with no work named and the site’s own note that community-added quotes are not verified. Quotefancy ↗ prints the same shortened text. The excised words — “it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist” — are what make it an argument rather than a compliment.
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The Americanised rewrite“Anyone… sympathize” Respelled
A widely shared variant opens with “Anyone” and uses American spelling, as on Busted Halo ↗, which also drops the individualist clause. Wilde wrote “Anybody” and “sympathise.”
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The wrong year“The Soul of Man under Socialism (1881)” Misdated
The Quotations Page ↗ names the right essay but dates it 1881. The essay appeared in February 1891, a decade later than that.
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A neighbouring line, not this oneGore Vidal Different saying
“Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies” is a separate, much later remark. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it to Gore Vidal, credited with a variant of the line — “Every time a friend succeeds I die a little” — in a February 1973 New York Times essay by Wilfrid Sheed, and using this exact wording himself in a September 1973 profile.
The sentence is not a stray epigram. It comes out of a stretch of the essay where Wilde is arguing that sympathy with pain is the easy, lesser kind, and that the harder task is sympathising with someone’s joy. He sets the line up with two short sentences — “The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It requires more unselfishness.” — and follows it by blaming modern competition, and English conformity in particular, for making such sympathy rare.
That is why the missing clause matters. “Individualist” is a technical word in this essay: Wilde’s whole case is that socialism’s point is to free people into individualism. Cut the clause and the line becomes a greetings-card observation about jealous friends; keep it and it is a step in an argument.
It requires more unselfishness.
The essay's own eventful publishing history
The Soul of Man Under Socialism first appeared in the Fortnightly Review in February 1891, pages 292–319. The manuscript bibliography ↗ records a first American printing in the Humboldt Library of Science, New York, in March 1891.
Its first appearance as a book came at a grim moment. Wikipedia’s account ↗ records the fifty-copy Chiswick Press printing of 30 May 1895, issued under the shortened title The Soul of Man — five days after Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency; the manuscript bibliography adds that it was privately printed for Arthur L. Humphreys. What was shortened was the title, not the essay.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin on 16 October 1854, became one of the most popular and influential dramatists in London in the early 1890s and is widely regarded as the greatest playwright of the Victorian era. Alongside the plays he wrote criticism and essays, of which The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) is the most political — an argument that socialism’s real purpose is to free people into individualism. In 1895 he was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour; he died in 1900, aged 46.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Fortnightly Review, n.s., 49, no. 290 (February 1891): 292–319.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend's success’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/anybody-can-sympathise-with-the-sufferings-of-a-friend-but/