Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Embracing temptation can relieve the internal struggle it creates.
This quote suggests that trying to suppress desires can lead to an unhealthy obsession with what we cannot have. Oscar Wilde argues that instead of resisting temptation, yielding to it may be a more honest approach, as our societal laws can sometimes make natural desires seem unnatural or monstrous.
Themes
TemptationDesireLongingForbiddenLaws
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about the importance of being true to oneself.
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
From the very first, it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership?
W. E. B. Du BoisRead
The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.
Felix FrankfurterRead
Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.
Joseph CampbellRead
I saw that philosophy had no power to make my life more bearable. Thus I lost my belief in philosophy.
Emil CioranRead
Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems.
Jared DiamondRead
Sometimes, when she's out here alone, she can feel the pulse of something bigger, as if all things animate were beating in unison, a glory and a connection that sweeps her out of herself, out of her consciousness, so that nothing has a name, not in Latin, not in English, not in any known language.
T.C. BoyleRead