Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Through our sunless lanes creeps Poverty with her hungry eyes, and Sin with his sodden face follows close behind her. Misery wakes us in the morning and Shame sits with us at night.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the pervasive presence of poverty and sin in our lives, emphasizing the struggles and emotional burdens they bring.
Oscar Wilde's quote paints a vivid picture of the relentless nature of poverty and its companion, sin. He describes how they creep into our lives, highlighting that misery is a constant reminder upon waking, and shame lingers throughout the night. This powerful imagery illustrates the emotional and psychological toll that these societal issues can have on individuals, suggesting a continuous cycle of despair that affects our daily existence.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on social justice, one could emphasize understanding the impact of poverty with quote from Oscar Wilde.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes βLondon 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
Similar quotes
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing.
The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.
One of God's central qualities is compassion, a word that in Hebrew is related to the word for "womb." Not only is compassion a female image suggesting source of life and nourishment but it also has a feeling dimension: God as compassionate Spirit feels for us as a mother feels for the children of her womb. Spirit feels the suffering of the world and participates in it. . . .
Wretched men cringe before tyrants who have no power, the victims of their trivial hopes and fears. They do not realise that anger is hopeless, fear is pointless and desire all a delusion. He whose heart is fickle is not his own master, has thrown away his shield, deserted his post, and he forges the links of the chain that holds him.