Time & Perspective Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde turns the sentimental family arc into a three-act tragedy, and he does it with the cool efficiency of a punchline. The first clause is pure social script: children start in worship, because dependence flatters authority into virtue. Then the blade slides in: “after a time they judge them.” Wilde’s genius is how casually he treats judgment as inevitable maturation, not moral failure. Growing up isn’t finding your own life; it’s putting your parents on trial with evidence you didn’t know you were collecting.

The real acid is the ending: “rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” Forgiveness is supposed to be the tidy Victorian resolution, the family restored, the moral account balanced. Wilde denies that closure. The subtext is that parents don’t just make mistakes; they author the conditions under which their children learn what “normal” is. Once that architecture becomes visible, it’s hard to unsee. Judgment is intellectual; forgiveness is emotional, and Wilde implies the emotional work is what almost never happens.

Context matters: Wilde wrote from inside a culture obsessed with respectability, lineage, and the performance of domestic harmony. His own life, marked by scandal and punishment, made him allergic to the idea that family and society reliably deserve absolution. The line’s cruelty is also a kind of mercy: it admits that some wounds are structural, not incidental, and that the adult child’s honesty may be less a betrayal than a late, clear-eyed form of love.