“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”

“But you will tell me this is an inartistic age, and we are an inartistic people, and the artist suffers much in this nineteenth century of ours. Of course he does. I, of all men, am not going to deny that. But remember that there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception.”

“Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.”

“Everybody one meets is a paradox nowadays. It is a great bore. It makes society so obvious.”

“The real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.”

“Lady Bracknell: Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?Chasuble: (Somewhat indignantly) She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability.Lady Bracknell: It is obviously the same person.”

“To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.”