Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The ability to accurately describe the past is a unique skill that belongs to both historians and anyone with depth and intellect.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde emphasizes the importance of interpretation and narrative in understanding history. He suggests that the task of accurately portraying events, even those that have not occurred, is not solely reserved for historians; rather, it is a privilege and responsibility of anyone who possesses the intellectual capacity and cultural awareness. This highlights a broader viewpoint on how everyone can engage with and interpret history in their own right.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about historical narratives, this quote could be used to underline the role of perspective in interpreting events.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes βLondon is too full of fogs and serious people. Whether the fogs produce the serious people, or whether the serious people produce the fogs, I don't know.
When one has never heard a man's name in the course of one's life, it speaks volumes for him; he must be quite respectable.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Similar quotes
I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that's true to some degree.
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
I am a Catholic, not so committed to the church, but to the idea of the Virgin, the female face of God.
Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man.
It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational, and we can never succeed in formulating them.
Are you scared?β asked Mr. Ibis. βNot really.β βWell, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.