Named source · 1895

The Importance of Being Earnest Quotes by Oscar Wilde: Context & Meanings

5 quotations linked to The Importance of Being Earnest by or associated with Oscar Wilde, with source notes, explanations and related topics.

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Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest

Topics and ideas

Identity, truth, social performance, marriage, class, manners, hypocrisy and comic reversals delivered through highly stylized dramatic dialogue.

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Primary / edition source · en.wikisource.org ↗ Primary / edition source · en.wikisource.org ↗ Primary / edition source · gutenberg.org ↗ Primary / edition source · en.wikisource.org ↗

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5 quotations with source context and meaning

Source identified1

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“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

Oscar Wilde

Voice: Fictional character · Algernon Moncrieff

Meaning & context

Wilde resists neat moral simplification by reminding the reader that truth often arrives mixed with context and contradiction.

Source details

The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I; Algernon Moncrieff. Exact catalog wording is preserved in the scan-backed Samuel French acting text on Wikisource, scan leaf 14 / printed page 12. The acting-text witness is abridged elsewhere, so this record is bound only to its independently verified page.

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“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”

Oscar Wilde

Voice: Fictional character · Jack Worthing

Meaning & context

The complaint is funny because it treats cleverness—normally a compliment—as an exhausting social excess that has become unfashionably common.

Source details

The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I; Jack Worthing. Exact catalog wording is preserved in the scan-backed Samuel French acting text on Wikisource, scan leaf 26 / printed page 24.

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Source identified3

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

Oscar Wilde

Voice: Fictional character · Miss Prism

Meaning & context

Miss Prism reduces fiction to a deliberately simplistic moral formula, and the neat certainty is precisely what makes the line comic.

Source details

The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II; Miss Prism. Project Gutenberg #844 preserves the exact line in the complete Act II text. The Samuel French acting-text witness represented elsewhere on this source hub omits this Cecily / Miss Prism happy-ending exchange, so this record deliberately uses the complete-text witness rather than a guessed scan page.

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Source identified4

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

Oscar Wilde

Voice: Fictional character · Lady Bracknell

Meaning & context

Lady Bracknell’s absurdly bureaucratic response turns tragedy into a social failing, which is funny because her concern for status overwhelms ordinary sympathy.

Source details

The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I; Lady Bracknell. Exact catalog wording is preserved in the scan-backed Samuel French acting text on Wikisource, scan leaf 24 / printed page 22, during her interrogation of Jack Worthing about his parentage.

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Source identified5

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“I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.”

Oscar Wilde

Voice: Fictional character · Cecily Cardew

Meaning & context

Cecily reverses the conventional preference for happy endings, turning literary taste into a compact joke about boredom and expectation.

Source details

The Importance of Being Earnest, Act II; Cecily Cardew. Project Gutenberg #844 preserves the exact line in the complete Act II text. The Samuel French acting-text witness represented elsewhere on this source hub omits this Cecily / Miss Prism happy-ending exchange, so this record deliberately uses the complete-text witness rather than a guessed scan page.

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Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest

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5 quotations with source context and meaning

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