Oscar Wilde

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

"To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune ... to lose both seems like carelessness."

"An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant as the case may be."

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his."

"Jack: That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple. Algernon: 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 have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose."

"In married life, three is company, and two is none."

"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."

"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 always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing."

"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."

"Mothers, of course, are all right. They pay a chap's bills and don't bother him. But fathers bother a chap and never pay his bills."

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

"No gentleman ever has any money."

"When a man does exactly what a woman expects him to do she doesn't think much of him. One should always do what a woman doesn't expect, just as one should say what she doesn't understand."

"I hope, Cecily, I shall not offend you if I state quite frankly and openly that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection."

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

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

"Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One must eat muffins quite calmly, it is the only way to eat them."

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

"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."

"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."

"I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest."

"If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life."

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

"Oh, I love London society! It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what society should be."

"Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world."

"Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is."

"I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself."

"Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do."

"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast."

"I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about."

"Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious."

"Life is never fair, Robert. And perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that is is not."

"Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb a the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf."

"All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon."

"Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear."

"The only possible society is oneself."

"To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance."

"However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive."

"Oh, why will parents always appear at the wrong time? Some extraordinary mistake in nature, I suppose."

"Lord Caversham: No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex. Lord Goring: Quite so. And we men are so self-sacrificing that we never use it, do we, father?"

"Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to."

"Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are."

"Lord Goring: Now I'm gonna give you some good advice. Mrs. Cheveley: Pray don't. You should never give a woman something she can't wear in the evening"

"Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings."

"When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own."