Wilde isn't simply cheerleading bold thinking—he's making a shrewder claim: that comfort itself corrupts thought. A truly original idea must threaten something: established comfort, cherished assumptions, professional hierarchies. Notice how he refuses the polite middle ground where we celebrate "creativity" while rewarding only the safely incremental. When a scientist challenges a century-old medical assumption and faces funding cuts, or when a writer submits work that makes publishers uncomfortable because it names what everyone pretends not to see, they're discovering Wilde's point the hard way—the moment an idea becomes genuinely worth having is precisely when it stops being safe.