Important Quotations Explained
LORD CAVERSHAM: And if you don't make this lady an ideal husband, I'll cut you off without a shilling.
MABEL CHILTERN: An ideal husband! Oh, I don't think I should like that. It sounds like something in the next world.
LORD CAVERSHAM: He can be what he chooses. All I want is to be to be oh, a real wife to him.
LORD CAVERSHAM: Upon my word, there is a good deal of common sense in that, Lady Chiltern.
There was your mistake. There was your error. 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 else is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.
LORD GORING: You see, Phipps, fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: And falsehoods the truths of other people.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, Phipps.
MRS. CHEVELEY: Ah! The strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analyzed, women merely adored.
SIR ROBERT: 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: And women represent the irrational.
MRS. CHEVELEY: Well-dressed women do.
Who on earth writes to him on pink paper? How silly to write on pink paper! It looks like the beginning of a middle-class romance. Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.
