Daily Inspiration Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde takes a word Victorians loved to distrust and gives it a makeover. “Ambition” usually arrives in moral discourse as a cautionary tale: the greasy ladder-climber, the social striver, the ego with legs. Wilde flips the script by calling it a “germ,” a metaphor that’s slyly double-edged. A germ is small, unseen, and suspected; it’s also the seed of life. By choosing a term that hints at contamination, he dodges sentimental uplift and instead argues that nobility is not pure, not inherited, not bestowed by etiquette. It starts as an irritation in the bloodstream.

The line also smuggles in Wilde’s favorite heresy: that the self is a work of art. “Growth” suggests nobleness isn’t a fixed moral badge but a process, something cultivated over time. In a culture obsessed with respectability, Wilde reframes aspiration as the engine of character rather than its corruption. Nobleness here isn’t meekness; it’s expansion - a reaching beyond one’s given station, one’s assigned identity.

There’s a quiet provocation in the absolutism: “from which all growth... proceeds.” Not some growth. Not most. All. Wilde is baiting the pious reader who wants virtue without desire, goodness without hunger. He implies that even the saint is a kind of ambitious person, just ambitious for a higher version of the self. In that twist is the Wildean wink: morality, like art, begins in wanting.