Quotes from The Importance of Being Earnest

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless."

"Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them."

"I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I never change, except in my affections.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.
Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden."
"But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!"
"I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing."
"That may be, but the muffins are the same!”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“Never met such a Gorgon . . . I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.
That is exactly what things were originally made for.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl...I have ever met since...I met you.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

“To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from The Importance of Being Earnest

About the author

Popular quotes

“Собака смотрит на палку, а лев — на того, кто ее кинул. Кстати, когда это понимаешь, становится намного легче читать нашу прессу…”
― Victor Pelevin, quote from The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

“Quantum mechanics. What a repository, a dump, of human aspiration it was, the borderland where mathematical rigor defeated common sense, and reason and fantasy irrationally merged. Here the mystically inclined could find whatever they required and claim science as their proof. And for these ingenious men in their spare time, what ghostly and beautiful music it must be--spectral asymmetry, resonances, entanglement, quantum harmonic oscillators--beguiling ancient airs, the harmony of the spheres that might transmute a lead wall into gold and bring into being the engine that ran on virtually nothing, on virtual particles, that emitted no harm and would power the human enterprise as well as save it. Beard was stirred by the yearnings of these lonely men. And why should he think they were lonely? It was not, or not only, condescension that made him think them so. They did not know enough, but they knew too much to have anyone to talk to. What mate waiting down the pub or in the British Legion, what hard-pressed wife with job and kids and housework, was going to follow them down these warped funnels in the space-time continuum, into the wormhole, the shortcut to a single, final answer to the global problem of energy?”
― Ian McEwan, quote from Solar

“My dreams were always the same I could see myself laughing . I was standing somewhere in a forest a raindrop rolled down a branch and fell on my nose . My hair was a sparkling red color and I was wearing a white flowing ball gown made from silk. I could feel him the one I loved staring at me intensely . His eyes as gold as the sun . I could hear him saying my love Fleur .. you are everything to me. His fingertips lightly shivering as he touched my face beckoning for me to come closer. I don't know what I would do if I lost you . "Are you sure you want to be with me?" My body protested as I fought for him to stay but he never did. As soon as I woke up his presence was gone.”
― Isabella Kruger, quote from Afterlife

“Should," I suddenly recal myself saying to Samantha and Miranda, "is the worst word in the English language. People always thing thing 'should' be a certain way, and when they're not, they're disappointed.”
― Candace Bushnell, quote from Summer and the City

“You've been a part of me forever. Don't you know that? I breathe your name in every exhalation.”
― Charlie Kaufman, quote from Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.