Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the differences in entertainment and social dynamics between urban and rural settings.
Oscar Wilde's quote highlights the contrasting experiences of being in a town versus the countryside. It suggests that while urban life tends to focus on self-amusement, rural life often involves engaging with and entertaining others, leading to a sense of boredom in the latter. Wilde uses this observation to comment on the societal expectations and feelings of isolation that can arise in different environments, emphasizing the complex nature of human interactions based on oneβs surroundings.
In practice
In a speech about urban life versus rural living.
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
Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins
From birth to death you go on living, groping in darkness with no light - and you could have created the light. You cannot find it in the scriptures; nobody can hand it to you. It is not purchased or sold; it is nontransferable. But you can create it - you can put all your energies together. You can start living consciously from this very moment.
Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows - then let your heart say in silence, "God rests in reason." And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, - then let your heart say in awe, "God moves in passion.
A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures?
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
The bad thing about small-town life is that everybody knows your business...I suppose that is my central obsession. What we owe to society, what we owe to ourselves.
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