To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
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An inspiring quote curated by QuickQuoteMaker.
Oscar Wilde published this in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), an essay arguing that most people's lives are shaped by conformity and economic necessity rather than by choice.
The sentence turns on the gap between existing and living. Existence is automatic and requires no decisions; living, in Wilde's sense, means exercising judgement about how one spends a life. His verdict is severe, but the essay makes clear he blamed the conditions that make conformity rational, not the people who submit to them.