Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.
Interpretation
Modern ideas or trends are often seen as old-fashioned over time.
Oscar Wilde's quote reflects the transient nature of modernity, suggesting that what is considered contemporary or fashionable today will inevitably be viewed as outdated in the future. This observation speaks to the cycles of change in culture, style, and thought, emphasizing that the only constant is the evolution of what is regarded as 'modern.'
In practice
In a discussion about fashion, one could quote Wilde to highlight how quickly trends can change.
Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
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.
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.
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
I saw the years of my life spaced along a road in the form of telephone poles threaded together by wires. I counted one, two, three... nineteen telephone poles, and then the wires dangled into space, and try as I would, I couldn't see a single pole beyond the nineteenth.
We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.
So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?
Though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen.
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
In mystical traditions, it is one's own readiness that makes experiences exoteric or esoteric. The secret isn't that you're not being told. The secret is that you're not able to hear.
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