When We love by Oscar Wild

EXCERPT FROM "An Ideal Husband"
Oscar Wilde

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN:

"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?

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.

Let women make no more ideals of men! let them not put
them on alters and bow before them...

LADY CHILTERN:

"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.
Oh! don't kill my love for you, don't kill that!"

"Robert,You are different. All your life you have stood apart from others.
You have never let the world soil you. To the world, as to myself,
you have been an ideal always. Oh! be that ideal still.
That great inheritance throw not away - that tower of ivory do not destroy".