Wealth & Money Quote by Samuel Johnson

Ambition, Johnson suggests, is not a harmless private hobby but a moral stress test - and failure is where the cracking starts. The line is built like a warning label: if you set your life to “wealth or power” and come up short, you don’t just lose the prize. You begin to lose the equipment that makes you decent. Honesty and courage aren’t framed as innate virtues here; they’re portrayed as conditions that require a certain stability of self-respect. Persistent frustration corrodes that stability.

The subtext is darker than simple prudence. Johnson is diagnosing how humiliation incubates compromise. The disappointed striver is tempted to reframe rules as obstacles designed by winners; the next step is petty deception, then rationalized wrongdoing. Courage, too, drains away - not because the person becomes physically timid, but because repeated defeat trains them into risk-avoidance, into the defensive crouch of someone who can’t afford another loss. “Will not long retain” implies a slow leak rather than a sudden fall: character erodes by increments, through small bargains made to keep hope alive.

Context matters. Johnson wrote in an 18th-century Britain where patronage, offices, and literary survival were tangled together; aspiration wasn’t abstract, it was economic weather. He knew what it meant to scramble for position and recognition, and he distrusted the shiny moral alibis people invent when the ladder won’t budge. The sentence lands because it’s both psychological and political: a society that dangles power as the main measure of worth quietly manufactures the vices it later condemns.