The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
- Source
- The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1, 1895
- Written
- 1895
About this quotation
Algernon says it in the opening scene, after Jack explains that his invented brother Ernest is the “whole truth pure and simple”. The play opened at the St James’s Theatre on 14 February 1895, weeks before Wilde’s trials began.