Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fixating on right and wrong can hinder one's intellectual growth.
Oscar Wilde suggests that being overly concerned with moral absolutes—what is right or wrong—limits one's capacity for intellectual growth and development. This fixation reflects an unwillingness to engage with complex ideas and nuances in ethics, stunting the evolution of one's thought processes and understanding of the world.
Themes
Intellectual GrowthMoralityPhilosophyDevelopmentThinking
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about ethics, this quote can highlight the importance of open-mindedness.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes →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.
Oscar WildeRead
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.
Oscar WildeRead
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Oscar WildeRead
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead
Similar quotes
things which in my mind blossom will stumble beneath a clumsiest disguise appear capable of fragility and indecision
E. E. CummingsRead
Sometimes, in doing philosophy, one just wants to utter an inarticulate sound.
Ludwig WittgensteinRead
There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.
Donna TarttRead
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
Thomas PaineRead
It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.
Henry Louis GatesRead
When good thing are accomplished, it does not claim (or name) them. This is Te, which is close in meaning to power or virtue. It is something within a person, and it is enhanced by following the Tao, or 'that from which nothing can deviate'.
LaoziRead