Good women bore one. That is the only difference between them.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

There is no pleasure in taking in a husband who never sees anything.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, jealousy, sin.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

Women … inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue it.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

As long as [a woman] can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

If a woman can’t make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.

“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”

The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.

“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”

She tried to found a salon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

For the British cook is a foolish woman who should be turned for her iniquities into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use.

“Dinners and Dishes”

Marriage is the one subject on which women agree and all men disagree.

“A Handbook to Marriage”

Our author, however, is clearly of the same opinion as the Scotch lassie who, on her father warning her what a solemn thing it was to get married, answered, “I ken that, father, but it’s a great deal solemner to be single.”

“A Handbook to Marriage”

Beauty, as some one finely said, is the purgation of all superfluities.

“More Radical Ideas Upon Dress Reform”

Miss Prism: Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Gwendolen: How absurd to talk of the equality of the sexes! Where questions of self-sacrifice are concerned, men are infinitely beyond us.

The Importance of Being Earnest

Lady Bracknell: No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating …

The Importance of Being Earnest

Lord Augustus: I prefer women with a past. They’re always so demmed amusing to talk to.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

Cecil Graham: Why, I have met hundreds of good women. I never seem to meet any but good women. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle-class education.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

Always! That is a dreadful word. ... Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear.

“The Soul of Man under Socialism”

MEN

A sentimentalist… is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.

“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Similarly in The Importance of Being Earnest

By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.

The Importance of Being Earnest

After a good dinner one can forgive anyone, even one’s own relations.

A Woman of No Importance

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.

A Woman of No Importance

There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to life. The old are in life’s lumber-room. But youth is the lord of life....

A Woman of No Importance

What you have to do at present is simply to fit yourself for the best society. A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.

A Woman of No Importance

A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.

A Woman of No Importance

Lord Illingworth: But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married.

Gerald: But if one is in love?

Lord Illingworth: One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.

A Woman of No Importance

The world has been made by fools that wise men should live in it!

A Woman of No Importance

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.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

My father would talk morality after dinner. I told him he was old enough to know better. But my experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

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.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

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

Lady Windermere’s Fan

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

Lady Windermere’s Fan

Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?

Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Lady Windermere’s Fan

Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in A Woman of No Importance

When a man says [he has exhausted life] one knows that life has exhausted him.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in A Woman of No Importance

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I like men who have a future, and women who have a past.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Young men want to be faithful, and are not: old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.

“The Soul of Man under Socialism”

The true perfection of man lies, not in what a man has, but what a man is.

“The Soul of Man under Socialism”

Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus.

De Profundis

The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence....

“The Soul of Man under Socialism”

For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.

“The Critic as Artist”

If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself—a rare type in our time,... you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days.

“The Critic as Artist”

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

“The Decay of Lying”

The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Algernon: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does.