Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote humorously suggests that social expectations often demand silence when one desires to ignore others.
Oscar Wilde's quote captures the irony of social interactions, where people often expect us to be attentive or quiet when we would prefer to tune out. It reflects the absurdity of situations where one feels overwhelmed by the noise of conversations and seeks to disengage, yet is pressured to remain fully present, creating a conflict between one's desires and societal expectations.
Themes
MusicSilenceSocialExpectationsIrony
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a humorous speech about the challenges of social gatherings.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes βLondon 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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