Wilde's observation cuts deeper than a simple rebuke of penny-pinchers—he's diagnosing a peculiar modern poverty: the ability to measure worth without understanding it. A cynic isn't merely stingy; he's someone whose skepticism has calcified into a kind of blindness, mistaking his spreadsheet for the whole story. Watch how this plays out when someone reduces a friendship to what they can extract from it, or dismisses an entire book because it didn't "return value"—they've priced the thing correctly while remaining utterly ignorant of what made it worth the knowing.