Science & Tech Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde turns courtship into a lab report and a legal document, and the joke lands because it’s uncomfortably close to how modern romance already operates. “Sentiment” is the sugar coating Victorian culture publicly demanded, the tearful sincerity that made desire respectable. Wilde brusquely rejects it, not because he’s anti-feeling, but because he distrusts feeling as performance: sentiment is the socially approved mask, not the truth underneath.

Starting with “science” is classic Wildean inversion. He treats love not as fate but as experiment: observation, hypothesis, selection. It’s a sly nod to the 19th century’s worship of rationality, Darwin, classification, and the idea that human beings can be curated like specimens. Romance, in his telling, becomes a calculated inquiry into compatibility, status, and leverage. It’s cynical, yes, but also bracingly honest: people assess each other even when they pretend they don’t.

Then comes the dagger: “end with a settlement.” That word drags the drawing-room fantasy straight into the world of contracts, property, divorce terms, and reputations. Wilde knew the price of social arrangement and moral policing; his own life demonstrated how quickly “love” becomes a matter of courts and consequences. The line works because it compresses an entire critique of bourgeois marriage into one punch: romance is sold as transcendence but administered as paperwork. The wit isn’t just decoration; it’s camouflage for a serious indictment of a culture that monetizes intimacy while insisting it’s sacred.