Daily Inspiration Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde’s cynic isn’t just a buzzkill; he’s a walking ledger. The line lands because it weaponizes the language of capitalism - “price” and “value” - then splits them apart like a parlor trick that turns into an indictment. Price is what society can tally, negotiate, and brag about. Value is the messy, unquantifiable stuff: loyalty, beauty, moral courage, the private meanings that don’t fit on an invoice. Wilde makes the cynic sound competent while quietly suggesting he’s spiritually illiterate.

The wit comes from how cleanly the sentence performs its own argument. It’s balanced, almost mathematical: everything/nothing. That symmetry flatters the reader’s intelligence, then implicates it. Anyone can learn prices; they’re public. Claiming to know them “of everything” is the kind of omniscience modern culture still rewards - the hot take, the ranking, the market-minded certainty. Wilde’s twist is that this omniscience is precisely the problem. Knowing prices becomes a substitute for knowing people.

Context matters: late-Victorian Britain was drunk on respectability and commerce, measuring worth through property, status, and “good sense.” Wilde, both a master of the drawing-room aphorism and a target of the era’s moral bookkeeping, understood how easily sophistication curdles into contempt. The subtext is self-protective too: cynicism is a pose that pretends not to care, so you can’t be hurt by what you can’t quantify. Wilde punctures that pose by calling it what it is - not realism, but a failure of imagination.