Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Shakespeare might have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the white streets of London, or seen the serving-men of rival houses bite their thumbs at each other in the open square; but Hamlet came out of his soul, and Romeo out of his passion.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the deep emotional and philosophical origins of Shakespeare's characters, contrasting them with the mundane reality of their social interactions.
Oscar Wilde suggests that while Shakespeare may have encountered ordinary situations and people in London, the true essence of his plays and characters like Hamlet and Romeo arises from profoundly rich emotional landscapes within the human experience. Wilde emphasizes the distinction between surface-level social encounters and the deeper, more complex feelings that drive Shakespeare's greatest works.
Themes
ShakespeareArtHamletRomeoEmotionPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
Discussing the depths of character development in a literature class.
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.
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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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