Daily Inspiration Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde turns nostalgia into a knife: lamenting the shortage of "useless information" sounds like a fussy complaint about trivia, but it’s really a jab at a culture that insists everything justify itself. The line works because it inverts Victorian seriousness. In an age obsessed with progress, industry, and moral improvement, Wilde performs grief for the very thing utilitarians dismiss: knowledge that exists just to delight, to ornament, to wander.

"Nowadays" is doing quiet work. It frames the modern world as impatient, managerial, newly allergic to the purposeless. Wilde is mocking the emerging faith that value must be measurable, productive, convertible into status or profit. By calling useless information "sadly" scarce, he flatters the reader into noticing how much of life gets squeezed into a cost-benefit spreadsheet. The joke lands because it’s plausible: a society can become so results-driven it forgets why curiosity matters when it doesn’t come with credentials.

There’s also a sly self-defense in it. Wilde, the apostle of aestheticism, made an entire career out of arguing that art doesn't need to be good for you to be good. "Useless information" becomes a stand-in for art, gossip, style, epigram, the decadent pleasure of knowing something simply because it’s interesting. His mournful tone is staged, theatrical; the sadness is performative, and that performance is the point. It’s wit as resistance: a refusal to let the world turn every mental appetite into a job.