F. Y. B.
Com: Compulsory English: Semester-I
PLAY: ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’
Dr. Suneeta H. Nirmale
Act One quotes
Algernon: Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?
They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.
Jack: Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere?
Jack: When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people.
It is excessively boring.
Algernon: The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
Algernon: Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right… It is a great truth. It
accounts for the extraordinary number of bachelors that one sees all over the place.
Algernon: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were
either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
Algernon: The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly
scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.
Algernon: Ah! that must be Aunt Augusta. Only relatives, or creditors, ever ring in that Wagnerian
manner.
Jack: I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them.
Lady Bracknell: I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to
live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd. Nor do I in any way approve of the
modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be
encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.
Gwendolyn: My ideal has always been to love some one of the name of Ernest. There is something in
that name that inspires absolute confidence.
Gwendolyn: I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be
allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude.
Lady Bracknell: Mr. Worthing! Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture. It is most indecorous.
Lady Bracknell: I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a
delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
Lady Bracknell: What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties
exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one
position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.
Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both
looks like carelessness.
Lady Bracknell: To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to
me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst
excesses of the French Revolution.
Lady Bracknell: I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon
as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the
season is quite over.
Lady Bracknell: You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only
daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance
with a parcel?
Algernon: Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of
how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
Algernon: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.
Algernon: The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one
else, if she is plain.
Algernon: It is awfully hard work doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no
definite object of any kind.
Act Two quotes
Cecily: But I don’t like German. It isn’t at all a becoming language. I know perfectly well that I look
quite plain after my German lesson.
Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Algernon: Australia! I’d sooner die.
Miss Prism: And you do not seem to realise, dear Doctor, that by persistently remaining single, a man
converts himself into a permanent public temptation. Men should be more careful; this very celibacy
leads weaker vessels astray.
Algernon: If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-
educated.
Gwendolyn: I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read
in the train.
Cecily: 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.
Act Three quotes
Gwendolyn: In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.
Gwendolen: I have the gravest doubts upon the subject. But I intend to crush them. This is not the
moment for German scepticism.
Lady Bracknell: I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this
particular part of Hertfordshire, but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably
above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.
Lady Bracknell: Until yesterday I had no idea that there were any families or persons whose origin
was a Terminus.
Lady Bracknell: Three addresses always inspire confidence, even in tradesmen.
Lady Bracknell: Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it
do that.
Lady Bracknell: Algernon is an extremely, I may almost say an ostentatiously, eligible young man.
He has nothing, but he looks everything.
Gwendolyn: I never change, except in my affections.
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?
****
