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LADY BRACKNELL Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but he looks everything. What more can one desire?
Sep 13, 2025
I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose.
Cecily. This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade. Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.
The first professional play I ever saw was The Importance Of Being Earnest, and I just fell in love.
Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
More than half of modern culture depends upon what one shouldn't read.
I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.
Oh! I don't think I would like to catch a sensible man. I shouldn't know what to talk to him about.
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.
When people talk to me about the weather, I always feel they mean something else.
In married life three is company and two none.
I'll bet you anything you like that half an hour after they have met, they will be calling each other sister. Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first.
The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
Really, if the lower orders don't set a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty, and to someone else if she is plain.
I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.
An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be.
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.
I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.
It is awfully hard work doing nothing.
I could deny it if I liked. I could deny anything if I liked.
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 false impression
It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don't mind hard work when there is no definite object of any kind. To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing.
What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall- what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing.
I started doing regional theater. My first job was "The Importance of Being Earnest" at Dallas Theater Center.
I should have remembered that when one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals.
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs.
You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far.
I can resist everything except temptation.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us.
The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes men so very attractive.
By persistently remaining single a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.
Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.
You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
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.
No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
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.