Tired
Where Oscar Wilde wrote “To live is the rarest thing in the world”
For when you’ve been getting through the days instead of living them.
Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
In plain words
Getting through your days isn’t the same as living them. Wilde blames the way life is set up, with people working themselves out to hold on to things, not the people themselves.
Sit with this line → A few quiet exchanges about what it stirs in you.
Worth knowing
It comes from a political essay, first published in the Fortnightly Review in February 1891, arguing that ending private property would free people to be themselves. “One will live” is about that future. The line isn’t in The Picture of Dorian Gray; the novel’s text has no such sentence.
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