Meaning

This sentence delivers a quiet joke about self-deception. The character has turned habitual lateness into a philosophy by borrowing and inverting a well-known proverb about punctuality being a virtue. By labeling lateness a "principle," he gives a personal failing the dignity of a considered position. The joke works on two levels: it mocks the character's rationalization, and it also gently satirizes the broader habit of dressing up convenience or laziness in the language of high-minded reasoning.

Context

The novel is full of characters who express cynical or self-serving views with the confidence of drawing-room epigrams. Wilde used this technique throughout the book to explore how style and wit can be deployed to avoid genuine self-examination. The original proverb being inverted, about punctuality and the theft of time, was a common piece of Victorian moralizing, and turning it on its head was a way of mocking the culture of earnest maxims that the era took seriously. The humor depends on recognizing the original saying and appreciating the reversal.

About the author

Oscar Wilde was an Irish-born writer who spent much of his career in London, where he became famous for his comedies, his novel, and his skill as a conversationalist and public wit. He had a particular gift for the comic reversal, taking familiar moral sayings and twisting them to reveal their assumptions or absurdities. His writing career was cut short by imprisonment and then by exile and declining health, but the body of work he left behind, concentrated in a remarkably short productive period, has secured him a permanent place in the literary canon. He died in 1900.