QuoteProject
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching.
Oscar Wilde
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Overthinking can be detrimental to one's mental health, much like a disease.

In this quote, Oscar Wilde suggests that excessive thinking is harmful and can lead to negative consequences for mental well-being, comparable to physical illness. He contrasts this idea with the notion that while thought itself may be dangerous, it is not something that can easily spread from one person to another, indicating a certain level of personal responsibility in managing one's thoughts.

Themes

ThinkingHealthPhilosophyMental HealthDisease

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about mental health, one might quote Wilde to emphasize the risks of overthinking.

More from Oscar Wilde

Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
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

Many feel that in today's climate some of those in authority are exercising, in effect, a self-serving, 'ends justify the means' mindset as well, and that, in turn, empowers them to do the same.
Martin Luther King IiiRead
The Hebrew Bible contains multiple provisions to ensure that no one would go hungry. The corners of the field, forgotten sheaves of grain, gleanings that drop from the hands of the gleaner, and small clusters of grapes left on the vine were to be given to the poor.
Jonathan SacksRead
Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.
Robert M. PirsigRead
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous HuxleyRead
God how I hate new countries: They are older than the old, more sophisticated, much more conceited, only young in a certain puerile vanity more like senility than anything.
D. H. LawrenceRead
Grace can neither be bought, earned, or won by the creature. If it could be, it would cease to be grace.
Arthur W. PinkRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.