The Importance of Being Earnest Quotes

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”

“I really don’t see what is so romantic about proposing. One may be accepted - one usually is, I believe - and then the excitement is ended. The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

“In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.”

“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.”

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.”

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

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

“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”

“I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.”

“Long engagements give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which is never advisable.”

“To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.”

“I never change, except in my affections.”

“And you do not seem to realize, 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.”

“Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

“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 do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this particular part of Hertfordshire, but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.”

“What seem to us a bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.”

“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

“Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”

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

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

“It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.”

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

“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.”