To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Genuine
Yes. In An Ideal Husband (1895), Act III, said by Lord Goring. These are the character’s words, not a statement in Wilde’s own voice.
Found word for word by program in the full text.
- Work
- An Ideal Husband, 1895
- Where
- Act III
- Found at
- Paragraph 741 of the text
Researched by AI; checked by program against the full text on 31 October 2026. Editorial review: pending. How we check
On the page
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.1
PHIPPS. Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING. [Looking at himself in the glass.] Don’t think I quite like this buttonhole, Phipps. Makes me look a little too old. Makes me almost in the prime of life, eh, Phipps?
The scene
Lord Goring’s library in Curzon Street, in the evening. Back home in evening dress, he puts in his second buttonhole of the day and tosses epigrams at his impassive butler, who answers each one ‘Yes, my lord’: fashion is what one wears oneself, vulgarity the conduct of other people, falsehoods the truths of other people. This is the last in the series; then he worries that the buttonhole makes him look ‘almost in the prime of life’. Among the letters Phipps then hands him is a note from Lady Chiltern asking for his help, and the idle dandy spends the rest of the play saving his friends’ marriage. Wilde had printed the line a month before the premiere (3 January 1895) among his ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’ in The Chameleon, December 1894, as ‘a life-long romance’.
What it means
A dandy’s joke: the one love affair that never ends is with oneself.
Often misread
Now a slogan of the self-care and self-love movement, quoted as sincere advice to value yourself. In the play it is vanity mocked by its own speaker, said to a butler over a buttonhole; and Goring, the self-declared egotist, proves the most loyal and unselfish man in it.
Also shared as
- ShortenedTo love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance. Wilde’s own earlier printing, the last of the ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young’ (The Chameleon, December 1894; in Miscellanies). Seen in sources/oscar-wilde/miscellanies.en.txt.
- The form on posters and social mediaTo love yourself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. The self-help form, ‘oneself’ modernised to ‘yourself’.
Topics
Related quotes
- Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
- Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. (not found)
- Life is too important to be taken seriously. (paraphrase)
- There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
- I can resist everything except temptation.
Sources
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