from plays by
Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

This page:
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Salomé
A Woman of No Importance
An Ideal Husband
The Importance of Being Earnest

Category:

Drama

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Lady Windermere’s Fan

(1892)

Act One

Lord Darlington:
Oh, now-a-days so many conceited people go about society pretending to be good, that I think it shows rather a sweet and modest disposition to pretend to be bad. Besides, there is this to be said. If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

Lady Windermere:
Don’t you want the world to take you seriously then, Lord Darlington?

Lord Darlington:
No, not the world. Who are the people the world takes seriously? All the dull people one can think of, from the Bishops down to the bores.

Lord Darlington:
Do you know 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. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Topics:

Humanity

Two kinds

Lord Darlington:
I couldn’t help it. I can resist everything except temptation.

Topic:

Temptation

Act Three

Cecil Graham:
Oh! Wicked women bother one. Good women bore one. That is the only difference between them.

Cecil Graham:
My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip.

Lord Windermere:
What is the difference between scandal and gossip?

Cecil Graham:
Oh, gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

Cecil Graham:
[...] Well, there’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about.

Topic:

Marriage

Cecil Graham:
What is a cynic?

Lord Darlington:
A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Cecil Graham:
And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

Topic:

Cynicism

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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Salomé

(1893)

Herod:
[...] Ah! Wherefore did I give my oath? Hereafter, let no king swear an oath. If he keep it not, it is terrible, and if he keep it, it is terrible also.

Topic:

Oaths

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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A Woman of No Importance

(1893)

Act One

Lady Caroline:
As far as I can make out, the young women of the present day seem to make it the sole object of their lives to be always playing with fire.

Mrs. Allonby:
The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don’t know how to play with it who get burned up.

Act Three

Lord Illingworth:
[...] You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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An Ideal Husband

(1895)

Act One

Sir Robert Chiltern:
You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?

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

Sir Robert Chiltern:
And women represent the irrational.

Mrs. Chevely:
Well-dressed women do.

Compare to:

Robert A. Heinlein

Topic:

Science

Lord Goring:
[...] I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

Topic:

Advice

Act Two

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

Sir Robert Chiltern:
Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? 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. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not—there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage.

Topic:

Temptation

Sir Robert Chiltern:
[...] I remember having read somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Topic:

Prayer

Mrs. Chevely:
[...] Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

Topics:

Morality

Rationalizing

Lady Chiltern:
[...] And how I worshipped you! You were to me something apart from common life, a thing pure, noble, honest, without stain. The world seemed to me finer because you were in it, and goodness more real because you lived. And now—oh, when I think that I made of a man like you my ideal! the ideal of my life!

Sir Robert Chiltern:
There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us—else what use is love at all?

Act Three He is the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought.

Lord Goring:
You see, Phipps, Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

Phipps:
Yes, my lord.

Lord Goring:
Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.

Phipps:
Yes, my lord.

Lord Goring:
And falsehoods the truths of other people.

Phipps:
Yes, my lord.

Lord Goring:
Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.

Phipps:
Yes, my lord.

Lord Goring:
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance, Phipps.

Phipps:
Yes, my lord.

Lord Caversham:
[...] You have got to get married, and at once. Why, when I was your age, sir, I had been an inconsolable widower for three months, and was already paying my addresses to your admirable mother.

Mrs. Chevely:
[...] Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

Topic:

Romance

Act Four

Lord Goring:
[...] I love you.

Mabel Chiltern:
I know. And I think you might have mentioned it before. I am sure I have given you heaps of opportunities.

Lord Goring:
Mabel, do be serious. Please be serious.

Mabel Chiltern:
Ah! that is the sort of thing a man always says to a girl before he has been married to her. He never says it afterwards.

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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“The Grigsby Episode” was among cuts made in Wilde’s four-act original script for The Importance of Being Earnest, reducing it to the three-act production version. The scene has reappeared in a recent film adaptation.

The Importance of Being Earnest

(1895)

Act One

Jack:
I am in love with Gwendolen. I have come up to town expressly to propose to her.

Algernon:
I thought you had come up for pleasure? . . . I call that business.

Jack:
How utterly unromantic you are!

Algernon:
I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.

Topic:

Uncertainty

Algernon:
[...] You don’t seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none.

Jack:
That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.

Algernon:
Yes, and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.

Jack:
For heaven’s sake, don’t try to be cynical. It’s perfectly easy to be cynical.

Algernon:
My dear fellow, it isn’t easy to be anything now-a-days. There’s such a lot of beastly competition about.

Topic:

Cynicism

Jack:
Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.

Lady Bracknell:
I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind.

Topic:

Smoking

Lady Bracknell:
[...] Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever.

Topic:

Education

Act Two

Miss Prism:
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Topic:

Humanity

Algernon:
[...] You mustn’t think that I am wicked.

Cecily:
If you are not, then you have certainly been deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner. 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.

Topics:

Hypocrisy

Pretence

Cecily:
Miss Prism says that all good looks are a snare.

Algernon:
They are a snare that every sensible man would like to be caught in.

Cecily:
Oh! I don’t think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about.

Chasuble:
[...] My sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness can be adapted to almost any occasion, joyful, or, as in the present case, distressing. I have preached it at harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations, on days of humiliation and festal days. The last time I delivered it was in the Cathedral, as a charity sermon on behalf of the Society for the Prevention of Discontentment among the Upper Orders.

Topic:

Clergy

“The Grigsby Episode”

Algernon:
Exercise! Good God! No gentleman ever takes exercise. You don’t seem to understand what a gentleman is.

Grigsby:
I have met so many of them, sir, that I am afraid I don’t. There are the most curious varieties of them. The result of cultivation, no doubt.

Act Two

Algernon:
If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.

Algernon:
Do you really keep a diary? I’d give any thing to look at it. May I?

Cecily:
Oh, no. You see, it is simply a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication.

Topic:

Books (particular)

Gwendolen:
[...] But even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less than Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.

Topic:

History

Cecily:
[...] How dare you? This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.

Gwendolen:
I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

Topic:

Insults

Act Three

Lady Bracknell:
Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

Lady Bracknell:
To speak frankly, I am not in favor of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage which I think is never advisable.

Topic:

Marriage

Lady Bracknell:
[...] I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar, and often convincing.

Topic:

Rhetoric

Jack:
Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?

Gwendolen:
I can. For I feel that you are sure to change.

Topic:

Truth

text checked (see note) Feb 2005

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