Daily Inspiration Quote by Delphine de Girardin

“Business is other people’s money” lands like a wry parlor-room truth that still bruises. Delphine de Girardin, writing in a 19th-century France newly obsessed with finance, speculation, and the social theater of wealth, compresses a whole moral economy into six words. The line isn’t an economist’s definition; it’s a novelist’s exposure of motive. Business, she implies, rarely begins with productive genius or heroic risk. It begins with access: credit, inheritance, patronage, investors, a spouse’s dowry, a banker’s trust. The engine is not cash but permission.

The subtext is sharper than a generic critique of greed. Girardin is pointing at the social choreography behind “enterprise”: who gets to be called visionary versus reckless, who can fail safely, whose losses get socialized, whose gains get framed as merit. “Other people’s money” is a reminder that capitalism’s most celebrated attribute - risk-taking - often depends on distributing the risk downward while concentrating prestige upward.

As a novelist and salon figure, Girardin understood reputations as a kind of currency. Her phrase doubles as a comment on narrative itself: business is storytelling with stakes, the art of making your bet sound like inevitability to people who can’t see the full table. That’s why the line survives. It’s not anti-commerce so much as anti-illusion, puncturing the romance of the self-made hero with the unglamorous fact of leverage - financial and social - doing most of the work.