Wealth & Money Quote by George Herbert

A tidy line like this lands with the crisp authority of a proverb, but its real force is social: it turns a life into a timed exam. Herbert stacks four milestones - looks, strength, wealth, wisdom - as if they were scheduled appointments with fate. Miss your slot and the door closes. The cadence does the policing. Each decade arrives like a judge, each “nor” tightening the noose, until the final “will never” delivers the sentence.

Herbert, a seventeenth-century poet-priest, is writing out of an early modern world where “handsome” and “strong” aren’t just personal assets; they’re currencies in a status economy. Beauty and brawn are youth’s capital, the things that secure patronage, marriage prospects, and a place in the room. By forty, money is framed as proof you’ve learned the rules of the game. By fifty, wisdom is treated less as inner growth than as the respectable alibi of age: if you don’t have it by then, you’re not ripening; you’re merely persisting.

The subtext is both motivational and punitive. It flatters the disciplined reader - the one who invests early, manages appetites, builds reputation - and it scolds the late bloomer as morally suspect. There’s also an Anglican austerity humming underneath: time is short, vanity fades, and procrastination is a spiritual failure dressed up as self-improvement advice.

What makes it work is its merciless simplicity. Herbert doesn’t argue; he schedules. In doing so, he reveals a culture that confuses human becoming with measurable outcomes, then calls that confusion “wisdom.”