Daily Inspiration Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde turns a drawing-room generalization into a scalpel, and the cut lands on men. The line poses as a neat, almost scientific distinction between the sexes, but its real target is male vanity: the idea that a compliment is not just pleasant, but strategically disabling. “Disarmed” is the key verb. Praise becomes a weapon that works precisely because men prefer to imagine themselves as the wielder, not the mark.

The wit runs on inversion. Victorian culture loved to cast women as the more emotionally pliable sex, easily swayed by flattery. Wilde flips that script: women, trained by a society that appraises them relentlessly, have learned to treat compliments as currency, not truth. They can accept the performance without mistaking it for proof. Men, by contrast, are depicted as amateurs in the marketplace of admiration, unpracticed and therefore overconfident. They believe the nice thing said about them, and that belief makes them careless.

The subtext is Wilde’s favorite: social life is theater, and the most dangerous characters are the ones who forget they’re on stage. As a dramatist of manners, he’s not reporting on “the sexes” so much as mocking the rituals of courtship and status where language is leverage. The sentence is also a quiet revenge against earnestness: it suggests that the truly sophisticated person isn’t the one who flatters, but the one who can hear flattery and remain armed.