The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Genuine
Yes. In The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Act I, said by Algernon Moncrieff. These are the character’s words, not a statement in Wilde’s own voice.
Found word for word by program in the full text.
- Work
- The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895
- Where
- Act I
- Found at
- Paragraph 106 of the text
Researched by AI; checked by program against the full text on 31 October 2026. Editorial review: pending. How we check
On the page
ALGERNON. I suspected that, my dear fellow! I have Bunburyed all over Shropshire on two separate occasions. Now, go on. Why are you Ernest in town and Jack in the country?
[…] It’s one’s duty to do so. And as a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness, in order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in the Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes. That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple.
ALGERNON. The truth is rarely pure and never simple.1 Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
JACK. That wouldn’t be at all a bad thing.
ALGERNON. Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. What you really are is a Bunburyist. […]
The scene
Algernon has found Jack’s cigarette case, inscribed to ‘Uncle Jack’ from ‘little Cecily’, and demands to know why his friend is Ernest in town and Jack in the country. Jack confesses his double life: as guardian to Cecily he must keep up a high moral tone in the country, so he has invented a wicked younger brother, Ernest, whose scrapes call him to London. He ends ‘That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple’, and Algernon turns the stock phrase over. He then reveals that he is a ‘Bunburyist’ himself, with an invalid friend he visits whenever he wants to escape.
What it means
Truth is seldom free of motive and almost never straightforward; Algernon adds, as a joke, that life and literature live on its complications.
Often misread
Quoted gravely, in courtrooms, journalism and philosophy, as Wilde’s wisdom about the complexity of truth. In the play it is a flippant reply to a friend’s confession of a lie, in a comedy about two men who lie for pleasure; the joke is that both men’s ‘truth’ is invention.
Also shared as
- ShortenedThe truth is rarely pure and never simple. The line on its own, without Jack’s ‘pure and simple’ that it plays on.
Topics
Related quotes
- Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
- Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery. Fyodor Dostoevsky
- When women go wrong, men go right after them. Mae West
- Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t. Mark Twain
- There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. (misattributed) Mark Twain
Sources
Cite it
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Act I. Spoken by Algernon Moncrieff. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/truth-is-rarely-pure-and-never-simple/ (31 October 2026).
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Checked by people
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