Wealth & Money Quote by Hilaire Belloc

Exhaustion is Belloc's punchline, and he aims it at two respectable idols: romance and art. "I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme" sounds like a poet confessing burnout, but it also reads as a controlled demolition of the pose that poets are powered by passion and aesthetic duty. Love is supposed to be eternal; rhyme is supposed to be the poet's natural habitat. Belloc flips both into chores.

The sly twist is how briskly he lets "money" swagger in as the only reliable pleasure. Not noble, not transcendent, not even complicated. "All the time" is the dagger: it's the promise of consistency in a life of fickle feelings and fickle inspiration. The line works because it mimics the rhythm of a light verse quip while quietly admitting something darker about modern life: the marketplace doesn't ask you to feel, it just pays. Love disappoints, art demands, money delivers.

Context matters. Belloc wrote in an early 20th-century Britain where the bohemian myth and the professionalization of writing were colliding. His Catholic, distributist sympathies often made him suspicious of both decadent romanticism and commercial modernity, which makes the joke double-edged. He's not exactly worshipping cash; he's exposing how easily it wins when the traditional consolations - intimacy and artistry - start to feel like overworked scripts. The cynicism lands because it's comic, and the comedy lands because it's uncomfortably true.