Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.
Interpretation
Modern ideas or trends are often seen as old-fashioned over time.
Oscar Wilde's quote reflects the transient nature of modernity, suggesting that what is considered contemporary or fashionable today will inevitably be viewed as outdated in the future. This observation speaks to the cycles of change in culture, style, and thought, emphasizing that the only constant is the evolution of what is regarded as 'modern.'
In practice
In a discussion about fashion, one could quote Wilde to highlight how quickly trends can change.
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
Ah! How I hate the crimes of the new generation: they are dry and sterile as darnel.
It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.
I believe you make your day. You make your life. So much of it is all perception, and this is the form that I built for myself. I have to accept it and work within those compounds, and it's up to me.
Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
One of the things that I've come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is that I'm talking about myself.
When the last living thing Has died on account of us, How poetical it would be If Earth could say, In a voice floating up Perhaps From the floor Of the Grand Canyon, "It is done." People did not like it here.
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