Oh, don’t cough, Ernest. When one is dictating one should speak fluently and not cough. Besides, I don’t know how to spell a cough.
The people who have adored me – there have not been very many, but there have been some – have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
I didn’t say I liked it Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.
What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
Plain women are always jealous of their husbands. Beautiful women never are. They are always so occupied with being jealous of other women’s husbands.
We in the House of Lords are never in touch with public opinion. That makes us a civilised body.
Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.
You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. living, as you all do, on other and by them, you need at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season.
My dear young lady, there was a great deal of truth; I dare say, in what you said, and you looked very pretty while you said it, which is much more important.
But she is happiest alone. She is happiest alone.
I don’t know how to talk. Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.
It was you I thought of all the time, I gave to them the love you did not need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs.
Muffins should always be eaten quite calmly, as it is the only way to eat them!
He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression...
The tragedy of growing old is not that one is old but that one is young.
Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.
Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance.
I think life too complex a thing to be settled by these hard and fast rules.
Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope.
No woman should have a memory. Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman’s bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.