Wealth & Money Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde slips the knife in with a smile: what begins as a tidy moral fable about maturity ends as a deadpan surrender to the very vice the fable is supposed to outgrow. The line is built like a classic Victorian self-improvement anecdote - youthful error corrected by seasoned wisdom - then sabotaged by a single word. That final "is" turns repentance into punchline, and the reader into the butt of the joke for expecting uplift.

The intent isn’t simply to praise greed. It’s to mock the culture that pretends it doesn’t run on it. Wilde understood that respectable society loved to perform disdain for money while organizing every aspiration around it: marriage, status, taste, even charity. By having "old age" confirm the youthful belief rather than correct it, he exposes how "wisdom" often just means making peace with the system that rewards you. The subtext is a kind of cynical coming-of-age: you don’t transcend the market, you learn its rules and call that maturity.

Context matters. Wilde wrote in a late-19th-century Britain swelling with consumer display and rigid class signaling, where aesthetic refinement was both a critique of bourgeois values and a commodity sold back to them. As a playwright who turned social hypocrisy into entertainment, Wilde uses epigram as social x-ray: one neat sentence shows the skeleton of self-deception. The laughter it provokes is uncomfortable because it lands close to home - not on villains, but on the polite stories we tell ourselves about what we value.