Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
Interpretation
What this quote means
People often cling to beliefs and desires that are not necessarily true, which can lead them to make extreme sacrifices.
Oscar Wilde's quote expresses the idea that individuals are more likely to sacrifice themselves for ideals and beliefs that they wish to be true rather than those they actually know to be true. It highlights the power of desire and fear in shaping our convictions, suggesting that our inner struggles often dictate our actions more than objective truths.
Themes
BeliefTruthDesireSacrificeFear
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about the importance of values, one might use this quote to emphasize how people's convictions shape their actions.
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.
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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
Truth is the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.
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Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
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We are citizens of the world. The tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.
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Look... we're getting to be old men, and we've spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another's systems. I can see through Eastern values just as you can see through our Western ones. Both of us, I am sure, have experienced ad nauseam the technical satisfactions of this wretched war. But now your own side is going to shoot you. Don't you think it's time to recognise that there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?
John Le CarreRead