Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the tragic beauty of life, emphasizing that behind beauty often lies pain and suffering.
Oscar Wilde's quote captures the duality of beauty and tragedy, illustrating how often the most exquisite aspects of life come intertwined with sorrow and hardship. Through the lens of a beautiful woman's passionate but doomed love, we see a narrative that explores the complexities of existence, suggesting that our most cherished experiences often emerge from a backdrop of struggle and loss. The boy left behind embodies the aftermath of this tragic beauty, indicating that personal growth and perfection can stem from painful experiences. Thus, Wilde eloquently suggests that beauty and pain are inexorably linked in the human experience.
Themes
BeautyTragedyLovePainSufferingLife
In practice
Example use cases
This quote could be used in a discussion about the complexities of love in literature.
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
The world is being created and destroyed in this very moment. Whoever you met will reappear, whoever you lost will return. Don’t betray the grace that was bestowed on you. Understand what is going on inside you and you will understand what is going on inside everyone else. Don’t imagine that I came to bring peace. I came with a sword.
Paulo CoelhoRead
A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct
Aldo LeopoldRead
Those who deny the right of a jury to protect an individual in resisting an unjust law of the government, deny him all defence whatsoever against oppression.
Lysander SpoonerRead
No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.
George MasonRead
I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.
Jack KevorkianRead
Still seems it strange, that thou shouldst live forever? Is it less strange, that thou shouldst live at all? This is a miracle; and that no more.
Edward YoungRead