— The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Act 1
About this quote
हिन्दी में
सच शुद्ध तो कभी-कभार ही होता है, और सरल कभी नहीं।
What it means
The sentence makes two unequal claims and the inequality is the point. Rarely pure allows that truth is sometimes unmixed; never simple allows no exceptions at all. Wilde is also using two words that are not synonyms: pure means unmixed with interest or motive, simple means reducible to a short statement. A thing can be one without the other.
What keeps it in use is that it works equally well as an insight and as an escape hatch. Stated as a general law about truth, it can be produced in answer to a specific question about a specific fact, and it sounds like rigour while conceding nothing. That double life is why the line has outlasted most of the epigrams around it.
What it teaches you
Split the two halves before you accept the sentence. That a matter is impure, with mixed motives in it, is a different admission from its being unstateable in a paragraph, and most things that are the first are not the second. The practical version: when you catch yourself writing it is complicated, decide whether you mean the facts are genuinely entangled or that you would rather not lay them out, and if it is the second, write the paragraph anyway.
अर्थ और सीख
यह पंक्ति दो अलग बातें कहती है: सच कभी-कभार शुद्ध हो सकता है, लेकिन सरल कभी नहीं। ‘कभी-कभार’ और ‘कभी नहीं’ का यही अंतर इसकी जान है, और ‘शुद्ध’ का मतलब है नीयत से अछूता, जबकि ‘सरल’ का मतलब है थोड़े में कह देने लायक। सीख यह है कि जब कोई सीधे सवाल के जवाब में सच की पेचीदगी पर भाषण देने लगे, तो अक्सर जवाब टाला जा रहा होता है।
Where it comes from
Algernon, in the first act, batting away Jack’s claim to be telling him the truth. It is Wilde’s best one-line defence of his own method: a play built entirely on deception in which nobody’s motives are actually complicated.
The line has since been adopted by journalists, lawyers and scientists, generally in earnest, which would probably have delighted him.
