Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote expresses the disdain for social class differences in marriage, particularly regarding the speaker's daughter.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde uses irony to critique the rigid social hierarchies of his time, particularly the absurdity of valuing social status over love. The character expresses disbelief that an influential and respected family would allow their daughter to marry someone of lower social standing, highlighting the societal pressures and expectations surrounding marriage and class.
Themes
MarriageSocial ClassSocietyRelationshipsIrony
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the impact of social class on relationships.
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
I am stuffing your mouth with your promises and watching you vomit them out upon my face.
Anne SextonRead
He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.
Richard YatesRead
Being gay is a natural normal beautiful variation on being human. Period. End of subject. Therefore, any argument which says differently is an immoral supremacist one. Call it out as such. ... Be outraged, offended, angry and intolerant of any discussion or any one who describes you as unequal, undeserving or unnatural for being just as you are.
Larry KramerRead
Everybody used to talk about Chechnya as a place, in the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, that was essentially governed by extended family and regional networks that substituted for older clan structures. But those networks have been destroyed.
Fiona HillRead
The UK is an extraordinary partner for America and a force for good in an unstable world. I hope it remains strong, robust and united.
Barack ObamaRead
She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.
Zora Neale HurstonRead