Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Burton

There is a performer’s timing in Burton’s jab: one clean image, no mercy. The insult lands because it’s visually exact. You can see the animal straining under something glittering and useless to it, still chewing whatever’s rough and available. Wealth, in that frame, isn’t just wasted; it becomes a kind of self-inflicted humiliation. The rich miser isn’t tragic. He’s ridiculous.

As an actor, Burton knew that status is theater. Riches are props unless they translate into lived experience: pleasure, security, generosity, time. The line takes aim at the cultural fantasy that accumulation is achievement on its own. It’s not anti-ambition; it’s anti-hoarding. The “enjoys them not” clause is the knife. Money becomes meaningful only when it crosses the boundary from abstract scorekeeping to actual life.

The subtext is also about masculinity and performance. “A man that hoards…” frames the failure as a refusal to inhabit the power he’s supposedly earned. He carries the symbol of success but can’t metabolize it. That’s why the ass matters: a beast of burden, valued for labor, not discernment. Burton implies that miserliness reduces a person to a function.

Placed against Burton’s own mid-century celebrity world - where glamour, excess, and public appetite were part of the job - the quote reads like backstage wisdom. It’s a warning about letting the chase for tokens replace the point of the chase: a life that actually gets lived.