"Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future"- Oscar Wilde

Just last night actually, I was having a conversation with my friend Stephanie and she recalled a quote she had read somewhere online by Oscar Wilde which said, "Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future." When I first heard the quote, I found it to be a little ambiguous. I actually had to write it down and reread it in order to understand it better and analyze it. After thinking about it though, I interpreted it as everyone sins at some point in their life and even someone who might seem perfect has made mistakes before. In the same sense, someone who has sinned and has done mistakes can also change their life around and stop sinning. I then realized that I might have interpreted it this way because of the conversation I was having with my friend. Had we been talking about a different topic, I might not have thought of the quote in that way. Wilde's quote was ambiguous to me though because it really got me thinking about its meaning and I could see how easily it would be for people to interpret it differently. One could very easily disagree with the overall quote and say that it is not true; that everyone does not necessarily sin at some point in their life. My friend Stephanie for example argued with my own interpretation of the quote and said that "every sinner has a future" means that a sinner will keep sinning and will never stop doing it. She also thought the quote could mean that everyone sins and that there is no saint. I chose to talk about this specific quote because it was an ambiguous quote which can be interpreted in different ways according to each person's beliefs and state of mind when hearing or reading the quote.