Wit & Attitude Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Taylor lands the insult with a preacher's poise and a satirist's precision: if your self-worth rises with your bank balance, you're not just misguided, you're comically outclassed by geology. The line works because it performs a swift reversal. Wealth is supposed to elevate a person above "his neighbors"; Taylor grants that social premise for half a second, then detonates it by extending the logic to its absurd endpoint. If superiority comes from possessing more gold, the true aristocrat is the gold mine: mute, inert, and still "richer" than any gentleman strutting through town.

The subtext is theological and political at once. As a 17th-century Anglican clergyman writing amid England's churn of civil war, restored monarchy, and expanding commerce, Taylor is watching older hierarchies get renegotiated in cash. The emerging moneyed class wants riches to function like virtue, like birth, like divine favor. Taylor refuses the alchemy. Gold doesn't sanctify; it reduces. It turns the human into a ledger and the moral life into a comparison chart.

There's also a pastoral jab tucked inside the insult: pride isn't condemned because money is inherently evil, but because pride makes a person outsource identity to a commodity. The "fool" is someone who mistakes possession for personhood. Taylor's genius is to make that mistake look not merely sinful but embarrassing. He doesn't argue wealth down with doctrine; he humiliates it with metaphor, and in doing so he warns a society newly tempted to treat economic power as spiritual rank.