Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the notion of superiority and how it shapes one's perspective on life.
Oscar Wilde's quote reveals a cynical view of human relationships, suggesting that a sense of superiority over others is what provides a person with the strength to navigate life's challenges. It implies that a belief in one's own superiority can sustain an individual emotionally and psychologically, even if it stems from a flawed view of others' worth.
In practice
During a group discussion on personal growth and confidence, this quote can highlight the pitfalls of negative self-perception.
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
The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.
Every word affords me pain. Yet how sweet it would be if I could hear what the flowers have to say about death!
Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious.
Our status as a free society and world power is not based on brute strength. When we've taken up arms, it has been for the defense of freedom for ourselves and for other peaceful nations who needed our help. But now, faced with the development of weapons with immense destructive power, we've no choice but to maintain ready defense forces that are second to none. Yes, the cost is high, but the price of neglect would be infinitely higher.
This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.
The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
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