Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True friendship is tested in moments of both suffering and success.
This quote by Oscar Wilde highlights the complexity of human emotions and relationships, emphasizing that while it is easy to feel sympathy for a friend in distress, it takes a genuinely virtuous person to also share in the joy of their success. True friends rejoice in each other's achievements, reflecting a deep and selfless bond that goes beyond mere sympathy.
Themes
FriendshipSuccessSympathyJoySupport
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech at a friend's wedding, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of supporting each other through successes.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes →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.
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
Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.
EpicurusRead
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
Virginia WoolfRead
If you go looking for a friend, you're going to find they're very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you'll find them everywhere.
Zig ZiglarRead
With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution to my being of happiness, strength and understanding remains to sustain me in an altered world.
Helen KellerRead
For a friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a brother
HomerRead
A real friend does not pick up the bill for an addict’s drugs: he packs the friend off to rehab instead. Today, only those who speak up against Israel’s policies – who denounce the occupation, the blockade, and the war – are the nation’s true friends.
Gideon LevyRead