The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second. Words are perhaps the worst. Words are merciless. . .

I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.

It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind. -Algernon

Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.

Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.

Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days. Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much. Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

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.

To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice.

Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I? Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy.

I have come up to town expressly to propose to her. Algernon. I thought you had come up for pleasure? . . . I call that business.

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

JACK: Apoplexy will do perfectly well, Lots of people die of apoplexy, quite suddenly, don't they? ALGERNON: Yes, but it's hereditary, my dear fellow. It's a sort of thing that runs in families. JACK: Good heavens! Then I certainly won't choose that. What can I say? ALGERNON: Oh! Say influenza. JACK Oh, no! that wouldn't sound probable at all. Far too many people have had it.

My dear boy, I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.