The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.

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.

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!

You don’t seem to realise, that in married life three is company and two is none.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Indeed I am not sure that I would desire to reclaim him. I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment’s notice. As a man sows so let him reap.

I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down, I should probably forget all about them.

This world is good enough for me, cousin Cecily. Cecily. Yes, but are you good enough for it?

A misanthrope I can understand—a womanthrope, never!

My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.

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

It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just been introduced is almost unbearable.

I don’t think that you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?

It would hardly have been a really serious engagement if it hadn’t been broken off at least once.

men are so cowardly, aren’t they?

How can you 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 killed Bunbury this afternoon. I mean poor Bunbury died this afternoon.

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.

To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now.

Why should there be one law for men, and another for women?

I always told you, Gwendolen, my name was Ernest, didn’t I? Well, it is Ernest after all. I mean it naturally is Ernest.

I’ve now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.