Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the idea that sentimental people enjoy feelings without the responsibilities or consequences that come with them.
Oscar Wilde's quote suggests that a sentimentalist seeks the comfort and beauty of emotions but avoids the deeper, often difficult experiences and costs associated with them. It implies a superficial engagement with feelings, where one desires the luxury of emotion while shirking the accountability that genuine emotional investment requires.
In practice
In a discussion about emotional depth during a philosophy class.
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
When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary - it's this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death, and they speak of starvation.
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live.
When you look at it that way, you can see how absurd it is that we individualize ourselves with our fences and hoarded possessions.
Racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, or hatred of anyone with different beliefs has no place in the human mind or heart.
Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number.
The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition, and of this thought no longer forms a part; but belief is only a stadium of mental action, an effect upon our nature due to thought, which will influence future thinking.
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