QuoteProject
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
Oscar Wilde
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Life is driven by physical and emotional elements rather than just our desires or intentions.

Oscar Wilde's quote emphasizes that life is shaped by our biological makeup and emotional experiences rather than solely by our conscious decisions. He suggests that the complexities of human existence stem from a blend of physical attributes and deeper emotional drives, with our thoughts and passions intertwined in a rich tapestry that defines who we are.

Themes

LifeThoughtPassionEmotionBiology

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be shared during a philosophy discussion to highlight the complexities of human existence.

More from Oscar Wilde

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
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

This will be the day when we shall bring into full realization the dream of American democracy - a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Read
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.
Bram StokerRead
The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.”
Thomas SowellRead
Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.
Annie DillardRead
When we see the world through our thoughts, we stop experiencing life as it really is and others as they really are. When I have a thought about you, that’s something I’ve created. I’ve turned you into an idea. In a certain sense, if I have an idea about you that I believe, I’ve degraded you. I’ve made you into something very small. This is the way of human beings, this is what we do to each other.
AdyashantiRead
What the meat industry figured out is that you don't need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable... Factory farms calculate how close to death they can keep animals without killing them. That's the business model. How quickly they can be made to grow, how tightly they can be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick they can get without dying...We live in a world in which it's conventional to treat an animal like a block of wood.
Jonathan Safran FoerRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.