Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.
Interpretation
What this quote means
General statements about morality lack significance without context and specifics.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde highlights the futility of speaking in broad terms when it comes to moral issues. While abstract ideas can be engaging, they fail to provide the nuanced understanding necessary to apply morals meaningfully in real life, suggesting that moral discussions require specificity and personal relevance to have any true impact.
Themes
MoralsGeneralitiesIntellectualPhilosophyMeaning
In practice
Example use cases
During a debate about ethics, one might invoke this quote to emphasize the need for concrete examples in moral discussions.
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
Divinity is not something supernatural that ever and again invades the natural order in a crashing miracle. Divinity is not in some remote heaven, seated on a throne. Divinity is love. . . . Wherever goodness, beauty, truth, love, are-there is the divine.
Harry Emerson FosdickRead
There was no air; only the dead, still night fired by the dog days of August. Not a breath. I had to suck in the same air I exhaled, cupping it in my hands before it escaped. I felt it, in and out, less each time…until it was so thin it slipped through my fingers forever. I mean, forever.
Juan RulfoRead
Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.
Calvin CoolidgeRead
The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the sound is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived.
James JoyceRead
But what more oft in nations grown corrupt, _x000D_ And by their vices brought to servitude, _x000D_ Than to love bondage more than liberty,_x000D_ Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
John MiltonRead
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.
John Quincy AdamsRead