“The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life. And the body is born young and grows old. That is life's tragedy.”
Oscar Wilde · A Woman of No Importance, 1893
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Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
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About this quote
Meaning
Wilde is drawing a sharp line between two very different ways of understanding the world. Knowing the price of something is a mechanical, transactional act: you read a label or check a ledger. Knowing the value of something requires judgment, imagination, and a sense of what truly matters. The line suggests that modern commercial life, by training people to think only in terms of cost, quietly destroys a deeper kind of wisdom.
Context
Lady Windermere's Fan was performed in 1892 and was Wilde's first major theatrical success. The play is set in fashionable London society and uses the drawing-room comedy format to expose the shallowness and moral confusion hiding beneath polished manners. This particular line is delivered by the witty Lord Darlington and works as one of many epigrammatic jabs at a society Wilde saw as obsessed with appearances and money. The observation has since traveled far beyond the play itself.
About the author
Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, poet, and essayist who rose to fame in Victorian England through his dazzling conversation, his provocative essays, and a series of brilliant stage comedies. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement, which placed beauty and artistic experience at the center of life. Despite a career cut short by imprisonment and exile, his writings remain widely read, quoted, and performed more than a century after his death.
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