The Importance of Being Earnest

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

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.

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

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.

In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.

I never change, except in my affections.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

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.

I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.

Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.

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!

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.

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.

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!

Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much

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.

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?

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.

Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. That is exactly what things were originally made for.

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.

ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl...I have ever met since...I met you.

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.