Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Yes; poor Bunbury is a dreadful invalid. Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. This shillyshallying with the question is absurd.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of decisiveness in life.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde critiques a character's indecision regarding a serious matter, highlighting how wavering on important choices can be seen as foolishness. It suggests that making a definitive choice is essential, rather than lingering in uncertainty, which can lead to an absurd situation.
Themes
DecisivenessIndecisionChoiceAbsurdLife
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about the importance of decision-making.
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.
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
Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.
John SteinbeckRead
Live in the world as if only God and your soul were in it; then your heart will never be made captive by any earthly thing.
John Of The CrossRead
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
Tim O'BrienRead
Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.
Ernest HemingwayRead
Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.
Alexander PopeRead
What secret knowledge, one must wonder, is breathed into lawyers when they become Justices of this Court that enables them to discern that a practice which the text of the Constitution does not clearly proscribe, and which our people have regarded as constitutional for 200 years, is in fact unconstitutional?
Antonin ScaliaRead