Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fixating on right and wrong can hinder one's intellectual growth.
Oscar Wilde suggests that being overly concerned with moral absolutes—what is right or wrong—limits one's capacity for intellectual growth and development. This fixation reflects an unwillingness to engage with complex ideas and nuances in ethics, stunting the evolution of one's thought processes and understanding of the world.
Themes
Intellectual GrowthMoralityPhilosophyDevelopmentThinking
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate about ethics, this quote can highlight the importance of open-mindedness.
More from Oscar Wilde
All quotes →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
In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.
Jimmy CarterRead
The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead
I don't care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
William FaulknerRead
To have a faith, therefore, or a trust in anything, where God hath not promised, is plain idolatry, and a worshipping of thine own imagination instead of God.
William TyndaleRead
We put this 15-year old girl on the cover of a fashion magazine, and tell everyone she is the epitome of sexual perfection, but we jail anyone who touches her for another three years.
Hugh LaurieRead
In tragedy great men are more truly great than in history. We see them only in the crises which unfold them.
Napoleon BonaparteRead