Act I
Algernon: 'The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either.'
Read in Books4Free →Wildean Epigrams and Paradoxes
From The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The play is studded with Wilde's signature inverted aphorisms that puncture Victorian pieties through paradox, treating trivial things seriously and serious things trivially.
Act I
Algernon: 'Divorces are made in Heaven.'
Read in Books4Free →Act I
Jack: 'When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people.'
Read in Books4Free →Act II
Miss Prism: 'The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.'
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Algernon: 'All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.'
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