Wealth & Money Quote by Sara Teasdale

Poverty becomes a dare in Teasdale's line: you can take the money, the status, the proof, but you cannot bankrupt the inner life. "I have no riches but my thoughts" borrows the blunt grammar of accounting, then flips the ledger. The pivot word is "Yet" - not a sigh, not a moral lecture, but a quiet refusal to let external lack define the self. In a culture that treats worth as something you can tally, she proposes an alternate currency: consciousness.

The subtext is less Hallmark than survival strategy. Teasdale isn't claiming that thoughts automatically substitute for food or safety; she's staking out a zone of autonomy when the material world is indifferent or hostile. That matters for a woman writing in the early 20th century, when economic dependence and social permission were often prerequisites for a public voice. Declaring the mind as "wealth" isn't just romantic; it's protective. It keeps the self from being auctioned off to whatever validates it.

The phrase "wealth enough for me" is the slyest part. It's deliberately modest, almost anti-performative. She doesn't argue that thought should be everyone's chosen fortune; she insists only on sufficiency, on having "enough". That stance reads like a rebuke to both conspicuous consumption and spiritual one-upmanship. Teasdale makes inner richness sound less like an abstract ideal and more like a lived practice: an inventory taken in private, where the numbers finally add up.