Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Don't use big words. They mean so little.
Interpretation
Using simple language can convey deeper meaning than complex vocabulary.
This quote by Oscar Wilde suggests that the use of complicated or grandiose language often dilutes the message rather than enhancing it. By advocating for simplicity in communication, Wilde emphasizes that clarity and sincerity are more valuable than ostentatious word choices that may confuse or alienate one's audience.
In practice
A public speaker might use this quote to emphasize the importance of clear messaging in their speech.
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
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.
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.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.
My business skills have come from being guided by my inner self - my intuition.
Most people are highly optimistic most of the time.
Real excellence and humility are not incompatible one with the other, on the contrary they are twin sisters.
At times it is folly to hasten at other times, to delay. The wise do everything in its proper time.
A traveller at Sparta, standing long upon one leg, said to a Lacedaemonian, "I do not believe you can do as much." "True," said he, "but every goose can."
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