5 quotations linked to The Importance of Being Earnest by or associated with Oscar Wilde, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
Wilde resists neat moral simplification by reminding the reader that truth often arrives mixed with context and contradiction.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1; Algernon delivers the purity-and-simplicity line as a comic epigram during the play’s conversation about truth and social performance.
“I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays.”
The complaint is funny because it treats cleverness—normally a compliment—as an exhausting social excess that has become unfashionably common.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest; Algernon complains about the fashionable performance of cleverness.
“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
Miss Prism reduces fiction to a deliberately simplistic moral formula, and the neat certainty is precisely what makes the line comic.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 2; Miss Prism describes the plot of her lost novel.
“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune—to lose both seems like carelessness.”
Lady Bracknell’s absurdly bureaucratic response turns tragedy into a social failing, which is funny because her concern for status overwhelms ordinary sympathy.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1; Lady Bracknell reacts to Jack’s uncertain parentage.
“I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.”
Cecily reverses the conventional preference for happy endings, turning literary taste into a compact joke about boredom and expectation.
Source note: The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 2; Cecily responds while Miss Prism discusses her novel.