An Ideal Husband

by Oscar Wilde

Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women . . . merely adored.

I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.

Robert, men can love what is beneath them—things unworthy, stained, dishonoured. We women worship when we love; and when we lose our worship, we lose everything.

Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn’t so, life wouldn’t be worth living. . . .

Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.

Weak? Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not—there is no weakness in that.

It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one.

Ah, I forgot, your husband is an exception. Mine is the general rule, and nothing ages a woman so rapidly as having married the general rule.

The error all women commit. Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. 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. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man’s love is like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman’s. Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. You made your false idol of me, and I had not the courage to come down, show you my wounds, tell you my weaknesses. I was afraid that I might lose your love, as I have lost it now.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance,

I used to think ambition the great thing. It is not. Love is the great thing in the world.

My dear Arthur, women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are.

And self-sacrifice is a thing that should be put down by law. It is so demoralising to the people for whom one sacrifices oneself.