A family is a terrible incumbrance, especially when one is not married. – Oscar Wilde Vera, or The Nihilists
Ah, nowadays people marry as often as they can, don’t they? It is most fashionable. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Lady Markby, Act 1.
The three women I have most admired are Queen Victoria, Sarah Bernhardt and Lily Langtry. I would have married any of of them with pleasure. The first had great dignity, the second a lovely voice, and third a perfect figure. – Oscar Wilde In conversation
Girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Algernon, Act 1.
I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Lane, Act 1.
There is nothing so difficult to marry as a large nose. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Lady Markby, Act 1.
It’s a curious thing…about the game of marriage – a game, by the way, that is going out of fashion – the wives hold all the honours, and invariably lose the odd trick. – Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Darlington, Act 1.
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lord Illingworth, Act 1.
In married life three is company and two is none. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Algernon, Act 1.
It is he who has broken the bond of marriage – not I. I only break its bondage. – Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lady Windermere, Act 2.
I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Lady Bracknell, Act 1.
Nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lady Hunstanton, Act 2.
Egad! I might be married to her; she treats me with such demmed indifference. – Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Augustus, Act 2.
Damme, sir, it is your duty to get married. You can’t be always living for pleasure. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Lord Caversham to Lord Goring, Act 2.
Lady Stutfield: I have noticed a very, very sad expression in the eyes of so many married men. Mrs. Allonby: Ah, all that I have noticed is that they are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Act 2.
You want a new excitement, Prince. Let me see – you have been married twice already; suppose you try falling in love for once. – Oscar Wilde Vera, or The Nihilists
The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation. – Oscar Wilde De Profundis
I assure you women of that kind are most useful. They form the basis of other people’s marriages. – Oscar Wilde Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lady Plymdale, Act 2.
All men are married women’s property. That is the only true definition of what married women’s property really is. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Mrs. Allonby, Act 2.
Nothing ages a woman so rapidly as having married the general rule. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Lady Markby, Act 2.
I wouldn’t marry a man with a future before him for anything under the sun. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Mabel Chiltern, Act 2.
It’s perfectly scandalous the amount of bachelors who are going about society. There should be a law passed to compel them all to marry within twelve months. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lady Caroline, Act 2.
On the whole, the great success of marriage in the States is due partly to the fact that no American man is ever idle, and partly to the fact that no American wife is considered responsible for the quality of her husband’s dinners. – Oscar Wilde The American Man
Women have become so highly educated…that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lady Caroline, Act 2.
More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common sense of the husband than by anything else. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Mrs. Allonby, Act 2.
It is the growth of the moral sense of women that makes marriage such a hopeless, one-sided institution. – Oscar Wilde An Ideal Husband, Lord Goring, Act 3.
No married man is ever attractive except to his wife. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Miss Prism, Act 2.
In America, the horrors of domesticity are almost entirely unknown. There are no scenes over the soup, nor quarrels over the entrees, and as, by a clause inserted in every marriage settlement, the husband solemnly binds himself to use studs and not buttons for his shirts, one of the chief sources of disagreement in ordinary middle-class life is absolutely removed. – Oscar Wilde The American Man
The happiness of a married man depends on the people he has not married. – Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance, Lord Illingworth, Act 3.
Chasuble: Your brother was, I believe, unmarried, was he not? Jack: Oh yes. Miss Prism: People who live entirely for pleasure usually are. – Oscar Wilde The Importance of being Earnest, Act 2.