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
The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. / That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.
Philippe PetitRead
Returning to the source is serenity.
LaoziRead
We must face the fact that the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.
Friedrich August Von HayekRead
If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.
Albert SchweitzerRead
In a fully free society, taxation-or, to be exact, payment for governmental services-would be voluntary.
Ayn RandRead
With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.
Virginia WoolfRead