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The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
Oscar Wilde
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Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote expresses a preference for the company of those who understand both beauty and sorrow.

Oscar Wilde emphasizes that he values relationships with artists and individuals who have experienced suffering, as they possess a deeper understanding of life's complexities. The appreciation for beauty intertwined with sorrow reflects a profound emotional depth that Wilde finds lacking in those who have not faced such experiences, making them uninteresting to him.

Themes

BeautySorrowArtRelationshipsEmotion

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about the importance of creativity, one might say, 'As Oscar Wilde noted, the only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered.'

More from Oscar Wilde

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
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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.
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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.
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Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
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