Lady Windermere’s Fan Quotes

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

– Oscar Wilde

Lady Windermere: Are all men bad?
Duchess of Berwick: Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.

– Oscar Wilde

Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.

– Oscar Wilde

Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.

– Oscar Wilde

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.

– Oscar Wilde

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.

– Oscar Wilde

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.

– Oscar Wilde

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.

– Oscar Wilde

But we are positively getting elbowed into the corner. Our husbands would really forget our existence if we didn’t nag at them from time to time, just to remind them that we have a perfect legal right to do so.

– Oscar Wilde

Many a woman has a past, but I am told that she has at least a dozen, and that they all fit.

– Oscar Wilde

Do you know, Mr. Hopper, dear Agatha and I are so much interested in Australia. It must be so pretty with all the dear little kangaroos flying about. Agatha has found it on the map. What a curious shape it is! Just like a large packing case.

– Oscar Wilde

It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.

– Oscar Wilde

It’s most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they’re alone.

– Oscar Wilde

As soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.

– Oscar Wilde

Charming ball it has been! Quite reminds me of old days. And I see that there are just as many fools in society as there used to be. So pleased to find that nothing has altered!

– Oscar Wilde

Those straw-coloured women have dreadful tempers.

– Oscar Wilde

He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that’s so important nowadays.

– Oscar Wilde

With a proper background women can do anything.

– Oscar Wilde

A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.

– Oscar Wilde

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.

– Oscar Wilde