Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
It is awfully hard work doing nothing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Doing nothing takes effort and can be harder than it seems.
Oscar Wilde's quote highlights the irony of how seemingly simple tasks, like doing nothing, can actually require significant mental and emotional energy. It suggests that idleness is often more challenging than it appears, as it forces individuals to confront their own thoughts and feelings, leading to a restless state of being that can be as exhausting as work itself.
Themes
WorkNothingnessEffortIronyProductivity
In practice
Example use cases
Motivational speeches about the importance of productivity.
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.
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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.
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Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
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To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
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It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.
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Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
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Archie became absolutely still, afraid that the rapid beating of his heart might betray his sudden knowledge, the proof of what he'd always suspected, not only of Brother Leon but most grownups, most adults: they were vulnerable, running scared, open to invasion.
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