Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects a sense of envy towards enduring beauty and the transient nature of life.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde expresses a deep jealousy towards things that possess eternal beauty, contrasting them with the inevitable decay and loss experienced in human life. He laments the fact that while he ages and loses aspects of himself, the painted portrait captures a moment of his beauty eternally, provoking feelings of mockery from a static representation of himself as he faces the fluid nature of existence and time.
Themes
JealousyBeautyMortalityTimeSelf-Reflection
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of capturing moments, this quote can illustrate the longing for permanence in an impermanent world.
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.
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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.
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Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
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A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
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His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
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