Wealth & Money Quote by Edward Gibbon

Gibbon defines wealth the way an empire measures its borders: not by how much it can seize, but by what it can hold without collapsing. The line is a neat bit of Enlightenment bookkeeping that turns “rich” from a social ranking into a personal equation. Income minus expenses is the obvious ledger; the sly move is making “wishes” the real variable. If your desires expand without limit, no fortune is enough. If they’re disciplined, even modest means can feel imperial.

The intent is quietly polemical. In an 18th-century Britain thick with new commercial wealth and status performance, Gibbon offers a definition of prosperity that refuses the arms race. It’s not asceticism, exactly; he doesn’t glorify deprivation. He’s arguing for sovereignty over appetite. The subtext is self-fashioning: the historian who chronicles Rome’s overreach is also writing a miniature constitution for his own life, suggesting that private stability depends on the same restraint public powers ignore.

It works because the sentence mimics the logic it preaches. Balanced clauses, tidy equivalences, no emotional pleading - just arithmetic. That cool tone signals authority: he’s not begging the reader to admire simplicity, he’s demonstrating it. And there’s a faint, knowing irony in “indeed rich.” Gibbon understands that society’s definition of riches is louder than his. His reply is to make contentment sound like accounting - a kind of rhetorical miserliness that doubles as a flex.