The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

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

To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

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.

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain.

Cecily, you will read your Political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit. It is somewhat too sensational.

Chasuble. Your brother Ernest dead? Jack. Quite dead. Miss Prism. What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it.

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.

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