The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

Algernon. 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.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!

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’ll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister.

Algernon. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first. Now, my dear boy,

Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us. Cecily. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.

Cecily. Miss Prism says that all good looks are a snare. Algernon. They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in. Cecily. Oh, I don’t think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about.

Chasuble. But is a man not equally attractive when married? Miss Prism. No married man is ever attractive except to his wife. Chasuble. And often, I’ve been told, not even to her.

Lady Bracknell. Come here. Sit down. Sit down immediately. Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.

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.