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
He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person.
If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.
Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.
No louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast, When husbands or lap-dogs breathe their last.
Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.
Better sexy and racy Than sexist and racist
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