Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Despite facing difficult situations, some people choose to maintain hope and aim for greater things.
This quote by Oscar Wilde highlights the contrast between despair and aspiration. While everyone may experience hardship and feel 'in the gutter', it's the perspective of looking 'at the stars' that distinguishes those who strive for a brighter future from those who remain mired in negativity. It suggests that hope and a vision for a better life can uplift us from our current struggles.
Themes
HopeAspirationStrugglePerspectiveDreams
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a motivational speech to inspire resilience.
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
When you find that people are not telling you the truth---look out!
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Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Garrison KeillorRead
Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.
Chaim PotokRead
The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.
Rebecca SolnitRead
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
Aldous HuxleyRead
I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.
Albert EinsteinRead