| A man who can dominate a London dinner-table
can dominate the world.
|
| A man who can dominate a London dinner-table
can dominate the world. The future belongs to
the dandy. It is the exquisites who are going to
rule.
|
| After a good dinner one can forgive anybody,
even one's relations.
|
| Ah! that quite does for me. I haven't a word
to say... Too much care was taken with our
education, I am afraid. To have been well
brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It
shuts one out from so much. |
| Ah, all that I have noticed is that they are
horribly tedious when they are good husbands,
and abominably conceited when they are not.
|
| All Americans lecture, I believe. I suppose
it is something in their climate. |
| All men are married women's property. That
is the only true definition of what married
women's property really is. |
| All thought is immoral. Its very essence is
destruction. If you think of anything, you kill
it. Nothing survives being thought of. |
| And there was also, I remember, a clergyman
who wanted to be a lunatic, or a lunatic who
wanted to be a clergyman, I forget which. . .
|
| But good women have such limited views of
life, their horizon is so small, their interests
so petty. |
| But somehow, I feel sure that if I lived in
the country for six months, I should become so
unsophisticated that no one would take the
slightest notice of me. |
| Children begin by loving their parents.
After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever,
do they forgive them. |
| Curious thing, plain women are always
jealous of their husbands, beautiful women never
are! |
| Examinations are of no value whatsoever. If
a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and
if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is
bad for him.
|
Hester (smiling): We have the largest
country in the world, Lady Caroline. They used
to tell us at school that some of our states are
as big as France and England put together.
Lady Caroline: Ah! you must find it very
draughty, I should fancy. |
Hester: I dislike London dinner-parties.
Mrs. Allonby: I adore them. The clever people
never listen, and the stupid people never talk.
|
| I adore simple pleasures. They are the last
refuge of the complex.
|
| I am disgraced; he is not. That is all. It
is the usual history of a man and a woman as it
usually happens, as it always happens. And the
ending is the ordinary ending. The woman
suffers. The man goes free. |
| I am not at all in favour of amusements for
the poor, Jane. Blankets and coal are
sufficient. |
| I am not sure. . . that foreigners... should
cultivate likes or dislikes about the people
they are invited to meet. |
| I delight in men over seventy. They always
offer one the devotion of a lifetime. |
| I saw the governess, Jane. . . She was far
too good-looking to be in any respectable
household. |
| I was in hopes he would have married Lady
Kelso. But I believe he said her family was too
large. Or was it her feet? I forget which. |
| If you have not got women on your side you
are quite over. You might just as well be a
barrister or a stockbroker, or a journalist at
once. |
| 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. |
Lady Caroline: In my young days, Miss
Worsley, one never met any one in society who
worked for their living. It was not considered
the thing.
Hester. In America those are the people we
respect most. Lady Caroline: I have no doubt of
it. |
Lady Caroline: There are a great many things
you haven't got in America, I am told, Miss
Worsley. They say you have no ruins, and no
curiosities.
Mrs Allonby: What nonsense! They have their
mothers and their manners. |
Lady Hunstanton: But do you believe all that
is written in the newspapers?
Lord Illingworth: I do. Nowadays it is only the
unreadable that occurs.
|
| Lady Hunstanton: I don't know how he made
his money, originally. Kelvil: I fancy in
American dry goods. Lady Hunstanton: What are
American dry goods? Lord Illingworth: American
novels. |
Lady Hunstanton: I hear you have such
pleasant society in America. Quite like our own
in places, my son wrote to me.
Hester. There are cliques in America as
elsewhere, Lady Hunstanton. But true American
society consists simply of all the good women
and good men we have in our country.
Lady Hunstanton: What a sensible system, and I
dare say quite pleasant, too. I am afraid in
England we have too many artificial social
barriers. We don't see as much as we should of
the middle and lower classes. |
Lady Hunstanton: Music makes one feel so
romantic - at least it always gets on one's
nerves.
Mrs Allonby: It's the same thing, nowadays.
|
Lady Stutfield: There is nothing, nothing
like the beauty of home-life, is there?
Kelvil: It is the mainstay of our moral system
in England, Lady Stutfield. Without it we would
become like our neighbours. |
| Life is simply a mauvais quart d'heure made
up of exquisite moments.
|
Lord Illingwonh: Women have become too
brilliant. Nothing spoils a romance so much as a
sense of humour in the woman.
Mrs. Allonby: Or the want of it in the man.
|
Lord Illingworth: I was very young at the
time. We men know life too early.
Mrs. Arbwhnot: And we women know life too late.
That is the difference between men and women.
|
Lord Illingworth: People's mothers always
bore me to death. All women become like their
mothers. That is their tragedy.
Mrs. Allonby: No man does. That is his. |
Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins
with a man and a woman in a garden.
Mrs. Allonby: It ends with Revelations. |
Lord Illingworth: 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. |
| Man, poor, awkward, reliable, necessary man
belongs to a sex that has been rational for
millions and millions of years. He can't help
himself. |
| 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. |
| Men marry because they are tired; women
because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
|
| More marriages are ruined nowadays by the
common sense of the husband than by anything
else. |
| Most women in London, nowadays, seem to
furnish their rooms with nothing but orchids,
foreigners, and French novels. |
Mrs. Allonby: They say, Lady Hunstanton,
that when good Americans die they go to Paris.
Lady Hunstanton: Indeed? And when bad Americans
die, where do they go to?
Lord Illingworth: Oh, they go to America. |
| My dear Rachel, intellectual generalities
are always interesting, but generalities in
morals mean absolutely nothing. |
| My husband is a sort of promissory note; I'm
tired of meeting him.
|
| No man has real success in this world unless
he has got a woman to back him, and women rule
society. |
| 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. |
| Oh, your English society seems to me
shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its
eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper
in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared
with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong. |
| One can always tell from a woman's bonnet
whether she has got a memory or not. |
| One can survive everything nowadays, except
death, and live down anything except a good
reputation. |
| One has never heard his name before in the
whole course of one's life, which speaks volumes
for a man, nowadays. |
| One must have some occupation nowadays. If I
hadn't my debts I shouldn't have anything to
think about. |
| One should always be in love. This is the
reason one should never marry.
|
| One should never take sides in anything. . .
Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity and
earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the
human being becomes a bore. |
| One should never trust a woman who tells one
her real age. A woman who would tell one that,
would tell one anything. |
| People nowadays are so absolutely
superficial that they don't understand the
philosophy of the superficial. |
| She certainly has a wonderful faculty of
remembering people's names and forgetting their
faces. |
| She has not touched the tambour frame for
nine or ten years. But she has many other
amusements. She is very much interested in her
own health. |
| So much marriage is certainly not becoming.
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a
ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her
something like a public building. |
| 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, except during
this short breathing space after dinner; without
which, I believe, we poor women would be
absolutely worn to shadows. |
| The basis of every scandal is an absolutely
immoral certainty. |
| The English aristocracy supply us with our
curiosities, Lady Caroline. They are sent over
to us every summer, regularly, in the steamers,
and propose to us the day after they land. |
| The English country gentleman galloping
after a fox - the unspeakable in full pursuit of
the uneatable. |
| The happiness of a married man. . . depends
on the people he has not married. |
| The history of women is the history of the
worst form of tyranny the world has ever known.
The tyranny of the weak over the strong. |
| The Ideal Husband? There couldn't be such a
thing. The institution is wrong.
|
| 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. |
| The intellect is not a serious thing, and
never has been. It is an instrument on which one
plays, that is all. The only serious form of
intellect I know is the British intellect. And
on the British intellect the illiterates play
the drum. |
| The only difference between the saint and
the sinner is that every saint has a past, and
every sinner has a future. |
| The secret of life is never to have an
emotion that is unbecoming.
|
| The world has been made by fools that wise
men should live in it! |
| The world is simply divided into two classes
- those who believe the incredible, like the
public - and those who do the improbable. |
| The world was made for men and not for
women. |
| The youth of America is their oldest
tradition. It has been going on now for three
hundred years. To hear them talk one would
imagine they were in their first childhood. As
far as civilisation goes they are in their
second.
|
| There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged
are mortgaged to Life. The old are in life's
lumber-room. |
| To get into the best society, nowadays, one
has either to feed people, amuse people, or
shock people - that is all! |
| We in the House of Lords are never in touch
with public opinion. That makes us a civilised
body. |
| We women adore failures. They lean on us.
|
| What a typical woman you are! You talk
sentimentally and you are thoroughly selfish the
whole time. |
| What is our son at present? An underpaid
clerk in a small Provincial Bank in a third-rate
English town. |
| When one is in love one begins by deceiving
oneself. And one ends by deceiving others. That
is what the world calls a romance. |
| Women are a fascinatingly wilful sex. Every
woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt
against herself. |
| Women have become so highly educated... that
nothing should surprise us nowadays, except
happy marriages. |
| Women represent the triumph of matter over
mind -just as men represent the triumph of mind
over morals. |
| 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. |
| You were the prettiest of playthings, the
most fascinating of small romances. |
| You women live by your emotions and for
them. You have no philosophy of life. |
| Young women of the present day seem to make
it the sole object of their lives to be always
playing with fire. |
|
|
