Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that a belief can lose its validity when it is widely accepted by many people, implying that truth is subjective.
Oscar Wilde's quote examines the nature of truth and belief, proposing that the essence of what is true can be distorted or diluted by the mere agreement of a group. When many people adopt the same belief, it can transform from an absolute truth into a societal construct, revealing the complex interplay between perception and reality. This reflection encourages individuals to approach truth with skepticism and encourages critical thinking.
Themes
TruthBeliefSubjectiveRealityPerception
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophical debate about the nature of reality.
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
His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead
Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.
Oscar WildeRead
Similar quotes
Repudiating the sensible world, which he neither sees himself nor believes from those who have, the Peripatetic joins combat by childish quibbling in a world on paper, and denies the Sun shines because he himself is blind.
Johannes KeplerRead
The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.
John MiltonRead
It is not rebellion itself which is noble but the demands it makes upon us.
Albert CamusRead
The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
Alan LightmanRead
It is due to justice; due to humanity; due to truth; due to the sympathies of our nature; in fine, to our character as a people, both abroad and at home, that they should be considered, as much as possible, in the light of human beings, and not as mere property. As such, they are acted on by our laws, and have an interest in our laws. They may be considered as making a part, though a degraded part, of the families to which they belong.
James MadisonRead
It's just what people do when they're getting old, when they're sick of themselves and their life; they think of money and take care of themselves.
Jean-Paul SartreRead