Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that in modern times, people find comfort in pleasure rather than feeling remorse for their actions.
Oscar Wilde's quote highlights a shift in societal values, where the pursuit of pleasure has overtaken the need for reflection and remorse. In today's world, the idea of guilt or repentance seems antiquated; instead, individuals prioritize immediate gratification and enjoyment, often overlooking the moral implications of their choices.
In practice
During a seminar on modern ethical dilemmas, this quote could be used to illustrate how contemporary society prioritizes pleasure.
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 don't think tragic situations are necessarily devoid of beauty.
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
All history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development.
When you truly accept that those children in some far off place in the global village have the same value as you in God's eyes or even in just your eyes, then your life is forever changed; you see something that you can't un-see.
I can measure the motion of bodies but I cannot measure human folly.
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