Wealth & Money Quote by Gertrude Stein

A whole theory of American ambition gets punctured in one unbothered sentence. Stein admits the craving without performing the usual penance: no sermon about virtue, no bootstrap catechism. Just the clean, slightly insolent truth that “getting rich” is less a dream than a regime of behaviors, compromises, and attention management she refuses to submit to. The line works because it treats wealth not as an abstract reward but as a job description.

Stein’s genius is the double “want”: desire stays intact, even unapologetic, while the will to comply evaporates. That tension is the subtext. She’s mocking the culture that sells riches as destiny while hiding the actual toll: networking as labor, self-branding as identity, taste as transaction. The phrase “what there is to do” is doing the real satirical work, suggesting a known, almost sordid list everyone pretends not to recognize. It’s a shrug that indicts.

Context matters: Stein was an expatriate modernist who cultivated a life where art-making, salons, and collecting were forms of power that didn’t fit the straight line of capitalist striving. She lived adjacent to money and prestige without letting the market dictate her rhythms. The quote reads like an early critique of hustle culture: the refusal isn’t laziness; it’s aesthetic and ethical resistance. She’s asking whether wealth is worth the choreography it demands - and answering, with characteristic candor, not if it requires becoming someone else.