QuoteProject
Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins.
Oscar Wilde
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote compares the beauty of an orchid to the allure of the seven deadly sins.

Oscar Wilde's quote reflects on the paradox of beauty and temptation. By comparing the orchid's beauty to the seven deadly sins, he suggests that what is beautiful can also be morally questionable or alluring in a way that entices one towards indulgence and excess.

Themes

BeautyTemptationOrchidSinsOscar Wilde

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a discussion about the nature of beauty in art and literature.

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

I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.
Maya LinRead
The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
Jacques LacanRead
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
Bill MoyersRead
IN CINEMA IT IS NECESSARY NOT TO EXPLAIN, BUT TO ACT UPON THE VIEWER'S FEELINGS, AND THE EMOTION WHICH IS AWOKEN IS WHAT PROVOKES THOUGHT.
Andrei TarkovskyRead
That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.
Steven MillhauserRead
Theatre is liberating because it only works if it's truthful, That's what it requires. That's not true of film: the camera does lie.
Helen MccroryRead

A little wisdom, now and then

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