Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Disobedience is essential for progress and is viewed as a virtue.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde emphasizes the importance of disobedience as a catalyst for progress and innovation throughout history. He posits that rather than viewing disobedience as a flaw or wrongdoing, it should be recognized as a fundamental virtue that has enabled humanity to challenge existing norms and drive societal advancements through rebellion and critical thinking.
Themes
DisobedienceProgressRebellionVirtueHistory
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about civil rights, one could cite this quote to highlight the importance of standing up against unjust laws.
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
Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
Antoine De Saint-ExuperyRead
Knowing there is a world that will outlive you, there are people whose well-being depends on how you live your life, affects the way you live your life, whether or not you directly experience those effects. You want to be the kind of person who has the larger view, who takes other people's interests into account, who's dedicated to the principles that you can justify, like justice, knowledge, truth, beauty and morality.
Steven PinkerRead
The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.
Erich FrommRead
Those who turn against the Church do so to play to their own private gallery, but when, one day, the applause has died down and the cheering has stopped, they will face a smaller audience, the judgment bar of God.
Neal A. MaxwellRead
I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil.
Graham GreeneRead
Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is always, therefore, represented as blind.
Joseph AddisonRead