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Meaning
This line reads as a sharp inversion, where freedom is treated with suspicion instead of longing for it. It can be taken to mean that power can feel safer than liberty, or that someone may resist being released from a controlling bond. It lands in a conflict where independence sounds threatening, and the speaker exposes that uneasy, almost comic refusal to be saved.
When It Was Said
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Who It Was Said To
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Historical Context
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Source
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Original Language & Translation
Originally said in English.
Did They Really Say It?
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Did You Know?
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About Oscar Wilde
Irish author, poet and playwright
Oscar Wilde was an Irish author, poet and playwright of the late 19th century. He became one of London’s most popular and influential dramatists in the early 1890s, and is closely associated with the Aestheticism movement. He is best known for The Picture of Dorian Gray, his epigrams, plays and children’s stories. His writing often combines wit, style and pointed observation, and his reputation is also shaped by his 1895 criminal conviction for gross indecency and for practising homosexual acts.
More from Oscar Wilde (646 quotes) →More quotes by Oscar Wilde
- “Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.”Oscar Wilde
- “Pleasure is the only thing one should live for, nothing ages like happiness.”Oscar Wilde
- “Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, man…”Oscar Wilde
- “Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical c…”Oscar Wilde
Freedom: more sayings
- “When you truly sing, you sing yourself free. When you truly dance, you dance yourself free. When you walk in…”Jay Woodman
- “I absolutely loved improv! I felt very much at home being onstage. It freed me to be all sorts of people othe…”Mo Collins
- “It is not the simple statement of facts that ushers in freedom; it is the constant repetition of them that ha…”Quentin Crisp
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Books by Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
His only novel, full of quotable lines.