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.

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.

It isn’t. It is a great truth. It accounts for the extraordinary number of bachelors that one sees all over the place.

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.

I am quite aware of the fact, and I don’t propose to discuss modern culture. It isn’t the sort of thing one should talk of in private.

Come, old boy, you had much better have the thing out at once.

Jack. My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produces a false impression.

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

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. They do it so well in the daily papers.

You are absurdly careless about sending out invitations. It is very foolish of you. Nothing annoys people so much as not receiving invitations.

The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad.

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

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the modern sympathy with invalids.

Health is the primary duty of life.

should be much obliged if you would ask Mr. Bunbury, from me, to be kind enough not to have a relapse on Saturday,

You see, if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them.

It suits you perfectly. It is a divine name. It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.

A very good age to be married at. I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.

I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.

Mockery to educatio

What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.

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

I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over.

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.

Jack. Well, I won’t argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things. Algernon. That is exactly what things were originally made for.

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

It is perfectly phrased! and quite as true as any observation in civilised life should

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.

will take very good care you never do. She is excessively pretty, and she is only just eighteen.

Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.

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

Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.

Ernest, we may never be married. From the expression on mamma’s face I fear we never shall. Few parents nowadays pay any regard to what their children say to them. The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out. Whatever influence I ever had over mamma, I lost at the age of three. But although she may prevent us from becoming man and wife, and I may marry some one else, and marry often, nothing that she can possibly do can alter my eternal devotion to you.

The story of your romantic origin, as related to me by mamma, with unpleasing comments, has naturally stirred the deeper fibres of my nature. Your Christian name has an irresistible fascination. The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me.

Lane, you’re a perfect pessimist.

Idle merriment and triviality would be out of place in his conversation.

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.

Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened. I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us.

Fiction

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

hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

Well, I know, of course, how important it is not to keep a business engagement, if one wants to retain any sense of the beauty of life,

That is obviously the reason why the Primitive Church has not lasted up to the present day. And you do not seem to realise, dear Doctor, that by persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy leads weaker vessels astray.

That depends on the intellectual sympathies of the woman. Maturity can always be depended on. Ripeness can be trusted. Young women are green. [Dr. Chasuble starts.] I spoke horticulturally. My metaphor was drawn from fruits. But where is Cecily?

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

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.

visible personification of absolute perfection.