Oscar Wilde Quote

Throughout his writing career, Oscar Wilde has created a very large amount of inspirational and multi-meaning quotes. One of my favorites is “The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is unread.

” The main reason I enjoy this statement so much is because I believe that it has two different “definitions”. I feel like this statement represents the majority of ways how fairness and hard work is treated nowadays. Over time, I have realized that people tend to pay more attention and give more credit to the people who do less in life than the people who do more. I had once read a short story about two men whose names were Mr. Dolittle and Mr. Doalot.

Mr. Dolittle did not work as much and as hard as Mr. Doalot, yet Mr. Dolittle got paid more and Mr. Doalot who did more worked got paid less, therefore, no one paid attention to him nor gave him any credit for the large amount of work that he had done. To many people, this story is very relatable, much as the quote.

In Oscar Wilde’s quote, the two words that stand out to me the most are “unreadable” and “unread”. Unreadable means that it is difficult to read or interpret, therefore people would believe that if it were harder to understand, than the Journalist his wrote it must be smarter. Unread means that it was simply not read or thought about by choice, even if there was more information and hard work put into it. I believe that the second definition of this quote states that lots of time, it does not depend on how hard you tried because in certain situations you wont be able have any advantage. I think this because unreadable also means “not enjoyable to read” or “impossible to interpret” and unread also means “not well read” or “lacking knowledge of subject”.

As you can see, in this specific situation, it does not matter if you are the Journalist or Writer of literature because neither of them had any sort of advantage. This is an amazing quote and statement because it shows to sides or perspectives to what the state could be.