Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson cuts against the grain of the rising commercial ethos of 18th-century Britain with a line that sounds almost like a ledger correction: profit is not the whole account. The phrasing is shrewdly mercantile. “Business” shows up twice, first as the narrow hustle (“getting money”), then as the broader vocation (“the business of life”). He borrows the language of trade to argue for what trade can’t measure. That’s the hook: kindness isn’t positioned as a soft, optional virtue; it’s framed as work, cultivation, something you practice the way you practice a craft.

The subtext is both moral and social. Johnson knew a London where status was increasingly negotiated through commerce, where ambition could masquerade as virtue and where poverty was not an abstraction but a daily fact. By insisting kindness belongs in the same category as earning, he’s resisting the idea that a man’s worth is reducible to his income or productivity. The gendered “a man’s business” matters too: he’s lecturing the period’s ideal of masculine success, nudging it away from acquisition and toward responsibility.

Contextually, this is Johnson the essayist and lexicographer, steeped in Christian ethics and wary of self-deception. He doesn’t romanticize charity; he professionalizes it. “Cultivate” implies intentionality and patience, a rebuke to performative benevolence. Kindness, in his view, isn’t sentiment. It’s a discipline that makes a life credible.