The Importance of Being Earnest

Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian manner.

There is no use speculating on that subject. Divorces are made in Heaven

Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.

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.

One must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.

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.

"He's dead. Quite dead."
"What a lesson for him! I trust he will profit by it."

"For heaven's sake, don't try to be cynical. It's perfectly easy to be cynical."
"My dear fellow, it isn't easy to be anything nowadays. There's such a lot of beastly competition about."

When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me.

"What do they talk about?"
"The fools? Oh! about the clever people, of course."
"What fools!"

I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.

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.

"If ever I get married, I'll certainly try to forget the fact."
"The Divorce Court was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted."

The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain.

However, I don't mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind.

The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. 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.