Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quality of a book is independent of its moral content; it is defined by the writing itself.
Oscar Wilde emphasizes that books should be judged solely on their literary quality, rather than their moral implications. This perspective suggests that the artistry of writing transcends moral judgments, and that both good and bad literature can exist regardless of the messages they convey.
Themes
BooksLiteratureWritingMoralityQuality
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote when discussing the value of literature in a book club.
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.
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
We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.
Seamus HeaneyRead
I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieRead
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.
Igor StravinskyRead
When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.
Frank Lloyd WrightRead
It's so easy to call something a Jewish story or a gay story or a woman's story. Aesthetically, if a story is not universal, it has failed. Your obligation is to the story. One rule creatively, and emotionally, is its universality.
Nathan EnglanderRead
I think of myself in the oral tradition-as a troubadour, a village tale-teller, _x000D_ the man in the shadows of the campfire. That's the way I'd like to be remembered-_x000D_ as a storyteller. A good storyteller.
Louis L'AmourRead