Nowadays we are all of us so hard up that the only pleasant
things to pay are compliments. They're the only things we can
pay.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Darlington, Act 1. |
I can resist everything except temptation.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Darlington, Act 1. |
I don't like compliments, and I don't see why a man should
think he is pleasing a woman enormously when he says to her
a whole heap of things that he doesn't mean.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lady Windermere, Act 1. |
Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about
it.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Darlington, Act 1. |
It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are
either charming or tedious.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Darlington, Act 1. |
Misfortunes one can endure--they come from outside, they are
accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults--ah!--there is
the sting of life.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Windermere, Act 1. |
Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least
a dozen, and that they all fit.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Dutchess of Berwick, Act 1. |
I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Mr. Dumby, Act 2. |
My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to
know better, they don't know anything at all.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Cecil Graham, Act 2. |
Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There
is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Darlington, Act 2. |
My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Cecil Graham, Act 3. |
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the
stars.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Darlington, Act 3. |
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting
what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Mr. Dumby, Act 3. |
A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Darlington's definition of a cynic,
Act 3. |
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Mr. Dumby, Act 3. |
I prefer women with a past. They're always so damned amusing
to talk to.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lord Augustus Lorton, Act 3. |
History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious
by morality.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Cecil Graham, Act 3. |
There is nothing in the whole world so unbecoming to a woman
as a Nonconformist conscience.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Cecil Graham, Act 3. |
I have never admitted that I am more than twenty-nine, or
thirty at the most. Twenty-nine when there are pink shades,
thirty when there are not.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Mrs. Erlynne, Act 4. |
What a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they
are of no use to us.
Lady Windermere's Fan
Lady Windermere, Act 4. |