Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Young people often view their elders as naive, believing their lack of experience grants them superior insight.
This quote by Oscar Wilde highlights the tendency of youth to underestimate the wisdom that comes with age. It suggests that young individuals may sometimes mistake their own inexperience for an advantage, believing they possess a fresh perspective that negates the life lessons learned by older generations. Wilde's observation speaks to the interplay of age and experience, urging a recognition of the value that comes from lived experiences.
Themes
YouthExperienceWisdomAgeInexperience
In practice
Example use cases
During a graduation speech emphasizing the importance of learning from elders.
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.
Oscar WildeRead
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.
Oscar WildeRead
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Oscar WildeRead
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead
Similar quotes
Develop discipline of self so that you do not have to decide and re-decide what you will do when you are confronted with the same temptation time and time again. You need only decide some things once.
Spencer W. KimballRead
What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife... Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment.
Nikola TeslaRead
If people buy my books for vanity, I consider it a tax on idiocy.
Umberto EcoRead
One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.
Nate SilverRead
If you send up a weather vane or put your thumb up in the air every time you want to do something different, to find out what people are going to think about it, you're going to limit yourself. That's a very strange way to live.
Jessye NormanRead
If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty.
Paramahansa YoganandaRead