Lady Windermere's Fan

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands.

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. (Mr. Dumby, Act III)

Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is the sting of life.

My life-my whole life- take it, and do with it what you will. I love you-love you as I have never loved any living thing. From the moment I met you I loved you, loved you blindly, adoringly,madly! You didn't know it then-you know it now.

Cecil Graham: What is a cynic? Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Cecil Graham: And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

Scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

I like talking to a brick wall- it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!

Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better. They wound, but they're better.

Experience is a question of instinct about life.

How long could you love a woman who didn't love you, Cecil? A woman who didn't love me? Oh, all my life!

What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Good heavens! how marriage ruins a man! It's as demoralizing as cigarettes, and far more expensive.

It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.

My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all.

Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.

Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant things to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.

God knows; I won't be an Oxford don anyhow. I'll be a poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other I'll be famous, and if not famous, I'll be notorious. Or perhaps I'll lead the life of pleasure for a time and then—who knows?—rest and do nothing. What does Plato say is the highest end that man can attain here below? To sit down and contemplate the good. Perhaps that will be the end of me too.

I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.

My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

A man who moralizes is a hypocrite, and a woman who does so is invariably plain.

Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.

I don't like compliments and I don't see why a man should think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

It's most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they are alone. The world has grown so suspicious of anything that looks like a happy married life.

I find I have, and a heart doesn’t suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn’t go with modern dress. It makes one look old.