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I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
Oscar Wilde
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Interpretation

What this quote means

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.

Themes

FriendshipNewOldRelationshipsFamiliarity

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used during a conversation about how friendships change over time.

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Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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