Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a desire for novelty and exploration in new friendships while suggesting a comfort in the familiarity of old friendships.
Oscar Wilde's quote highlights the human tendency to be intrigued by new relationships, where we seek to learn and understand everything we can about new friends. In contrast, with old friends, there's often a comfortable silence where the past holds strong value, and new discoveries are less necessary, emphasizing the different dynamics involved in varying lengths of friendship.
In practice
This quote can be used during a conversation about how friendships change over time.
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
London 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
A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.
Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as what they keep us from doing.
What I do requires fantastic concentration... but you can't be totally alone, or you lose all contact with reality, so even when I'm engrossed and secluded, Jack Dunphy can be there. He's my oldest and best friend, and best critic too.
I don't know how much longer I can keep going without a friend. I used to be able to do it very easily, but that was before I knew what having a friend was like.
I was told so many times when I was a kid, 'I can't be friends with you, you're too intense, you're too sad all the time.' I really thought that when I made the first album that everyone would understand me, all the people who weren't my friends would become my friends.
Loving friendships provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected.
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