Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the idea of moral superiority, suggesting that those who pride themselves on morality can often lack true humanity and compassion.
Oscar Wilde's quote challenges the perception of moral individuals as virtuous beings, arguing instead that a strong adherence to moral principles can lead to a lack of genuine human empathy and kindness. He implies that such 'moral' people may exhibit negative traits such as heartlessness and cruelty, positioning morality as a potentially dangerous and dehumanizing attribute rather than a commendable one.
In practice
This quote could be used during a debate on ethics and morality in a classroom setting.
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
What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?
To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.
We are so afraid of the idea of having to die... that we always try to find excuses for the dead, as if we were asking beforehand to be excused when it is our turn.
Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health of all human beings should be produced by the least possible labour of all.
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