The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University.

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 remind one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

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.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.

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

No, men are so cowardly, aren’t they?

One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.

To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.