An Ideal Husband

by Oscar Wilde

Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.

Ah, nowadays people marry as often as they can, don’t they? It is most fashionable.

Indeed? I have forgotten all about my schooldays. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.

But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.

much, say to such a theory as that? mrs. cheveley. Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women . . . merely adored. sir robert chiltern. You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women? mrs. cheveley. Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.

sir robert chiltern. And women represent the irrational. mrs. cheveley. Well-dressed women do.

lord goring. [In his most serious manner.] Of course. You see, it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person.

mrs. cheveley. Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

I have had a luck so extraordinary that sometimes it has made me almost afraid. I remember having read somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us—else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, Phipps.

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness.

You can forget. Men easily forget. And I forgive. That is how women help the world. I see that now.