Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Well, I don't like your clothes. You look perfectly ridiculous in them. Why on earth don't you go up and change? It's perfectly childish to be in mourning for a man who is actually staying a whole week with you in your house as a guest. I call it grotesque.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the absurdity of mourning someone's presence rather than appreciating their company.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde humorously observes the irrationality of being overly somber about a person's visit, suggesting that it is foolish to mourn someone who is actively present. He emphasizes the importance of embracing joy and levity in social interactions rather than adopting a melancholic demeanor in the face of companionship, thus highlighting the inconsistencies in human behavior and the need for a lighter perspective on life.
In practice
During a toast at a gathering, to encourage a light-hearted atmosphere.
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
Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.
It is not the body, nor the personality that is the true self. The true self is eternal. Even on the point of death we can say to ourselves, "my true self is free. I cannot be contained."
Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.
The trifling economy of paper, as a cheaper medium, or its convenience for transmission, weighs nothing in opposition to the advantages of the precious metals it is liable to be abused, has been, is, and forever will be abused, in every country in which it is permitted.
From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.
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