Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Speaking the truth can be uncomfortable, but dishonesty is far worse.
This quote by Oscar Wilde highlights the inherent discomfort that comes with truth-telling, suggesting that while honesty may cause pain, the consequences of deceit can be far more damaging and detrimental to an individual and their relationships. It suggests that integrity and truthfulness are essential virtues, even in the face of personal discomfort.
Themes
TruthLiesHonestyPainIntegrity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of integrity in leadership.
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.
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
What reason, like the careful ant, draws laboriously together, the wind of accident sometimes collects in a moment.
Friedrich SchillerRead
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery.
Leo TolstoyRead
It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
I Think it is lost.....but nothing is ever lost nor can be lost . The body sluggish, aged, cold, the ember left from earlier fires shall duly flame again.
Walt WhitmanRead
In tragedy great men are more truly great than in history. We see them only in the crises which unfold them.
Napoleon BonaparteRead
There is no law governing all things.
Giordano BrunoRead