This one is real, and the wording is exact. It is Lord Darlington’s reply to Cecil Graham in Act III of Lady Windermere’s Fan — asked “What is a cynic?”, he answers “A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” The play opened at the St James’s Theatre, London, on 20 February 1892 and was first printed in 1893; the line sits in the published text word for word.
“A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” Lord Darlington in Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, Act III (first performed 20 February 1892; first published 1893). Verified at quotle.info
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Evoking the world of Oscar Wilde — Irish playwright, novelist and poet. Theme: "A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The source
Work
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Passage
Act III — Lord Darlington, answering Cecil Graham
First performed
20 February 1892, St James’s Theatre, London
First published
1893, The Bodley Head, London
CECIL GRAHAM. What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.] LORD DARLINGTON. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. CECIL GRAHAM. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.
Act III
The famous line is only half the joke. Wilde balances the cynic against the sentimentalist in the very next speech, and the pairing almost never survives quotation.
July 1890 — Wilde first works the figure into print. In the Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine serialisation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry arrives late from bargaining over old brocade in Wardour Street and remarks that “Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing” ↗. Same idea, different sentence, no cynic in it.
20 February 1892 — Lady Windermere’s Fan opens at the St James’s Theatre in London ↗, and the figure is recast as a definition — a question from Cecil Graham, an answer from Lord Darlington.
Since — The two-line exchange gets folded into one portable sentence. Wikiquote records ↗ César Chávez using the compressed “A cynic is someone who…” form in a 1989 article, an example of how the line normally travels.
✓Public domain
Lady Windermere’s Fan was first performed in 1892 and first printed in 1893, and the earlier Dorian Gray variant appeared in Lippincott’s in July 1890 — all well before the 1931 US public-domain cutoff. Wilde wrote in English, so no translation copyright is involved; the text is free to quote and reproduce in the United States.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What gets garbled
The attribution is right — this is Wilde, and the wording is his. What goes wrong is the packaging: which work it came from, what shape the sentence had, and who it was aimed at.
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Wording“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” Compressed
Wilde wrote it as dialogue, not as a definition-shaped sentence: Cecil Graham asks the question, Lord Darlington supplies only the answer. The folded-up single-sentence version is what actually circulates — César Chávez quotes it in exactly that form (“A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”) in a 1989 article anthologised in An Organizer’s Tale, as recorded on Wikiquote ↗. Faithful to the sense, not to the page.
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SourceThe Picture of Dorian GrayConflated
Wilde did put a version of the figure in the novel, but it is a different sentence and not a definition of a cynic: Lord Henry, late after haggling in Wardour Street, says that “Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing” ↗ in the July 1890 Lippincott’s text. The cynic line belongs to the play.
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SubjectEconomists (and accountants, and bankers) Repurposed
Wilde did not write this as an aphorism. He wrote it as half of a two-line joke. In Act III a group of men are left smoking after dinner at Lord Darlington’s rooms; Cecil Graham, perched on the back of a sofa, asks what a cynic is, Darlington gives the definition everyone now quotes, and Graham immediately supplies the mirror image — the sentimentalist, who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of a single thing. Quoted alone, the line reads as a rebuke of cynics. Quoted whole, it is a joke at the expense of both temperaments.
Wilde had been circling the same figure of speech for a while before the play. In the July 1890 serialisation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry arrives late after haggling over a piece of old brocade in Wardour Street and observes that nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing — the same idea, a different sentence, and no cynic in it. The compressed “a cynic is a man who…” form people quote today belongs to neither passage exactly; it is the play’s dialogue smoothed into a single sentence.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Wilde was the most quoted wit of late-Victorian London, and the society comedies he wrote in the early 1890s — beginning with Lady Windermere’s Fan — are where most of his portable one-liners come from. His method was to hand a paradox to a character and then let another character puncture it, which is exactly what happens here: the cynic is defined, and a beat later the sentimentalist is defined right back. Because so many genuine epigrams are his, Wilde has also become a magnet for lines he never wrote — which makes the ones that are traceable to a printed page worth marking clearly.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, act 3 (London: The Bodley Head, 1893); first performed at the St James’s Theatre, London, 20 February 1892. Full text at Project Gutenberg, ebook 790.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-man-who-knows-the-price-of-everything-and-the-value-of/