Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
One should never make one's entrance with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
Interpretation
Avoid creating drama at the start of your life; save it for later to maintain intrigue.
Oscar Wilde suggests that a dramatic or scandalous entrance into life can overshadow one's true essence. Instead of seeking attention through turmoil or controversy, one should navigate through life with grace and save the more vivid stories for later, enriching the tapestry of one's life as time goes on.
In practice
A speaker at a retirement party might refer to the quote when reflecting on their career.
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
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.
Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.
Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.
Quiet people have the loudest minds.
Teach nothing new, but instill into all men's breasts those things which the Fathers of revered memory have with harmony of statement taught... Preach nothing else than what we received from our forefathers... Accordingly, both in the rule of faith and in the observance of discipline, let the standard of antiquity be maintained throughout.
When a man is at his wits' end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.
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