Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Lady Bracknell. Good afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving very well. Algernon. I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta. Lady Bracknell. That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the distinction between physical well-being and good behavior, suggesting they are often not aligned.
In this exchange between Lady Bracknell and Algernon, Oscar Wilde cleverly illustrates the nuance of human behavior, emphasizing that feeling well physically does not imply moral or social rectitude. The wit comes from the recognition that in society, people may often appear well externally while their behavior might be questionable. This reinforces Wilde's frequently satirical take on Victorian social norms.
In practice
In a speech on societal norms, one might use the quote to highlight the discrepancy between outward appearances and true behavior.
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
I'm lucky I don't make my living in front of the camera.
Listen, someone's screaming in agony- fortunately I speak it fluently
I said, "I do not fear those pants with nobody inside them." I said, and said, and said those words. I said them but I lied them.
It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.
I can levitate birds. No one cares.
I think we're losing our sense of humor instead of being able to relax and laugh at ourselves. I don't care whether it's ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, or whose ox is being gored.
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