"A Woman of No Importance" by Oscar Wilde

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• "One should sympathise with the joy, the beauty, the colour of life."
• "Nothing should be out of the reach of hope. Life is a hope."
•  "I think the stupid people talk a great deal."
• "More marriages are ruined nowadays by the common sense of the husband than by anything else. How can a woman be expected to be happy with a man who insists on treating her as if she were a perfectly rational being?"
• "Oh, women have become so highly educated, Jane, that nothing should surprise us nowadays, except happy marriages. They apparently are getting remarkably rare."
• "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."
• "The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life"
•  "The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all."
• {Lady Caroline} You believe good of every one, Jane. It is a great fault. {Lady Stutfield} Do you really, really think, Lady Caroline, that one should believe evil of every one? {Lady Caroline} I think it is much safer to do so, Lady Stutfield. Until, of course, people are found out to be good. But that requires a great deal of investigation nowadays.
• "One must have some occupation nowadays. If I hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to think about. All the chaps I know are in debt."
• "Curious thing, plain women are always jealous of their husbands, beautiful women never are!"
• "Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building."
• {Lord Illingworth} She is more than a mystery - she is a mood. {Mrs. Allonby} Moods don't last. {Lord Illingworth} It is their chief charm.
• {Lord Illingworth} I never intend to grow old. The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. MRS. ALLONBY. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.
• "I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex."
• "The annoying thing is that the wretches can be perfectly happy without us. That is why I think it is every woman's duty never to leave them alone for a single moment"
• "Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man's last romance."
• "The Ideal Husband? There couldn't be such a thing. The institution is wrong."
• "The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says."
• "When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also."
• "Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation."
• "A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world. The future belongs to the dandy."
• "Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact."
• "To get into the best society, nowadays, one has either to feed people, amuse people, or shock people - that is all!"
• {Gerald} It is very difficult to understand women, is it not? {Lord Illingworth} You should never try to understand them. Women are pictures. Men are problems. If you want to know what a woman really means - which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do - look at her, don't listen to her."
• "Women are a fascinatingly willful sex. Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself."
• "Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed."
• "One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry."
• "the world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them. And that, consequently, whatever the world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things"
• "To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much."
• "Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects."
• "The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming."
• "All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. If you think of anything, you kill it. Nothing survives being thought of."
• "Hearts live by being wounded. Pleasure may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrow - oh, sorrow cannot break it."