"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 have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else."
"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."
"LADY BRACKNELLTo 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."
"I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays."
"Well I won't argue about the matter. You always want to argue about things.That is exactly what things were originally made for."
"Lady Bracknell, I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?"
"Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating."
"Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right."
"LADY BRACKNELLThirty-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. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago now."
"Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable."
"JACKThat is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury.ALGERNONThen your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.JACKThat, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.ALGERNONYes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time."
"Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?I didn't think it polite to listen, sir."
"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."
"To begin with, I dined there on Monday, and once a week is quite enough to dine with one's own relations."
"Outside the family circle, papa, I'm glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be. The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man."
"We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces"
"It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a 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."
"I have a business appointment that I am anxious... to miss."
"If it was my business, I wouldn't talk about it. It is very vulgar to talk about one's business. Only people like stockbroker's do that, and then merely at dinner parties."
"MISS PRISMMemory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us."
"I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn't write them down, I should not probably forget all about them."
"They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance."
"My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about."
"Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the dinner-table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent . . . and that sort of thing is enormously on the increase. 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..."