The Importance of Being Earnest

Famous quotes

• Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Clever Jabs
  • Comedy

• 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.

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Love
  • Marriage

• Divorces are made in Heaven

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Comedy
  • Marriage

• More than half modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.

  Act IIn context

  • Reading

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

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Truth & Lies

• 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.

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Comedy
  • Marriage

• In married life three is company and two is none.

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Marriage

• Ah! that must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner.

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Comedy
  • Family

• I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Comedy

• Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Comedy
  • Music

• An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.

  Act IIn context

  • Marriage

• A man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.

  Act IIn context

  • Marriage

• 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.

  In context

  • Education
  • Knowledge

• 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.

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Clever Jabs
  • Family

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

  First Act, spoken by AlgernonIn context

  • Family
  • Men
  • Women

• Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

  Act IIIn context

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

  Act IIIn context

  • Writing

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

  Act IIIn context

  • Comedy

• 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.

  Act IIIn context

  • Friendship

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

  Act IIIn context

  • Comedy

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

  Third Act, spoken by Lady BracknellIn context

  • Clever Jabs

• 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.

  Third Act, spoken by Lady BracknellIn context

  • Character
  • Marriage

• No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

  In context

  • Age
  • Women

• 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.

  Third Act, spoken by Lady BracknellIn context

  • Age
  • Women

• This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

  Third Act, spoken by GwendolenIn context

  • Comedy

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

  Third Act, spoken by JackIn context

  • Comedy
  • Truth & Lies

Contents