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
You have a specific and important mission, that of keeping alive the relationship between the faith and the cultures of the peoples to whom you belong. . . . [W]e have to follow Christ along the concrete path of our daily lives so that he can transform us.
Pope FrancisRead
Stand not too near the rich man lest he destroy thee - and not too far away lest he forget thee.
Aneurin BevanRead
I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.
Sidonie Gabrielle ColetteRead
The hearts of women are like those little pieces of furniture with secret hiding - places, full of drawers fitted into each other; you go a lot of trouble, break your nails, and in the bottom find some withered flower, a few grains of dust - or emptiness!
Gustave FlaubertRead
LEONATO Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband. BEATRICE Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a pierce of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.
William ShakespeareRead
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard: women's, that when it is dead it stays dead.
H. L. MenckenRead