Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Embracing temptation can relieve the internal struggle it creates.
This quote suggests that trying to suppress desires can lead to an unhealthy obsession with what we cannot have. Oscar Wilde argues that instead of resisting temptation, yielding to it may be a more honest approach, as our societal laws can sometimes make natural desires seem unnatural or monstrous.
Themes
TemptationDesireLongingForbiddenLaws
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about the importance of being true to oneself.
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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