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
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.
In practice
In a debate about the importance of values, one might use this quote to emphasize how people's convictions shape their actions.
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
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
A cleric who loses his faith abandons his calling; a philosopher who loses his redefines his subject.
There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organization or status of existence as final. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature.
Thats how we survive infinity - we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.
Try to understand the ego. Analyze it, dissect it, watch it, observe it, from as many angles as possible. And don't be in a hurry to sacrifice it, otherwise the greatest egoist is born: the person who thinks he is humble, the person who thinks that he has no ego.
Ownership is not a vice, not something to be ashamed of, but rather a commitment, and an instrument by which the general good can be served.
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