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The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People quotes
14 quotes from The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People by Oscar Wilde. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #844 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.
— Gwendolen · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
— Algernon · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
— Gwendolen · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.
— Lady Bracknell · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
— Miss Prism · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
— Algernon · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
— Algernon · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.
— Jack · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.
— Lady Bracknell · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
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.
— Algernon · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
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.
— Lady Bracknell · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating . . .
— Lady Bracknell · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.
— Jack · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton
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?
— Jack · III. Drawing-Room at the Manor House, Woolton