Wealth & Money Quote by George Santayana

Santayana slips a blade into a velvet glove here: he admits an appetite for beauty while refusing the modern bargain that says pleasure must be privately owned. The line flatters the senses ("walk about among the beautiful things") and then swerves into renunciation, as if to say that the highest form of taste is not acquisition but access. He wants the world as a gallery, not a vault.

The subtext is a critique of possession as a kind of leash. "Private wealth" sounds less like comfort than paperwork: maintenance, anxiety, obligation, and the quiet bribery of self-censorship. To own is to be owned back - by fear of loss, by social expectations, by the need to justify how you got it and what you will do with it. Santayana frames liberty not as political slogan but as interior mobility: the freedom to move, to look, to think without the gravitational pull of assets.

Placed in his era's churn - industrial fortunes, conspicuous consumption, the rising idea that identity is built through goods - his refusal reads like an early anti-consumerist manifesto from someone who prized contemplation. It's also strategically modest: he doesn't deny that beauty matters; he denies the premise that beauty requires property. The rhetoric works because it's not puritanical. It's hedonism without inventory, pleasure unburdened by receipts, a philosophy of abundance that depends on detachment rather than deprivation.