Everything is dangerous, my dear fellow. If it wasn't so, life wouldn't be worth living.
Oscar WildeRead
Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber
Interpretation
What this quote means
Youth is a unique and valuable stage of life, unlike any other.
In this quote, Oscar Wilde highlights the preciousness of youth, suggesting that it possesses a distinct vitality and freedom that is lost in middle age and old age. He contrasts the carefree nature of youth with the burdens and regrets that often accompany later stages of life, where individuals are constrained by responsibilities and the passage of time.
Themes
YouthLifeFreedomMiddle AgeOld Age
In practice
Example use cases
In a graduation speech to emphasize the importance of seizing the moment.
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.
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His morality is all sympathy, just what morality should be
Oscar WildeRead
Similar quotes
At any given moment, we each face a barrage of obligations, often disparate and distinct from what we thought would happen when we woke up. From the tragic to the common to the extraordinary, life refuses to be divvied up into careful slices of time. No technology can manage to overcome the realities of reality.
Stacey AbramsRead
The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.
Carter G. WoodsonRead
Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten, Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold, Let it be forgotten forever and ever, Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
Sara TeasdaleRead
We think that it's the big moments that define our lives-the wedding, the baby, the new house, the dream job. But really, these big moments of happiness are just the punctuation marks of our personal sagas. The narrative is written every day in the small, the simple, and the common. In your tiny choices, in these tiny changes. In the unconsidered. The overlooked. The discarded. The reclaimed.
Sarah Ban BreathnachRead
O Lord God, we pray that we may be inspired to nobleness of life in the least things. May we dignify all our daily life. May we set such a sacredness upon every part of our life, that nothing shall be trivial, nothing unimportant, and nothing dull, in the daily round.
Henry Ward BeecherRead
Since people are going to be living longer and getting older, they'll just have to learn how to be babies longer.
Andy WarholRead