Wealth & Money Quote by Robert Fulghum

Fulghum’s line lands like a gentle reprimand to a culture that treats income as a scoreboard and calls it meaning. The sly move is in the first sentence: “anyone can make money” is obviously not literally true, which is precisely why it works. It’s a deliberate exaggeration that demotes money from destiny to skillset, something learnable, repeatable, even banal. He’s not ignoring inequality so much as refusing to grant wealth the moral authority it keeps trying to borrow.

The real bite is in “making a life worth living.” Fulghum’s phrasing dodges the self-help cliché of “happiness” and reaches for something more demanding: worth. Worth implies judgment, trade-offs, and the possibility that you can fail at living even while succeeding at earning. It also reframes “making” as an ongoing craft, not a passive state. You don’t discover a worthwhile life; you assemble it from choices, habits, relationships, and attention.

Context matters: Fulghum is a warm, plainspoken essayist who built a career on everyday ethics and small-scale wisdom. This isn’t a manifesto; it’s a values check delivered in a conversational register. The subtext is almost pastoral: if you’ve been chasing financial competence as proof you’re okay, you’re pursuing the easier exam. The “real test” is whether your life can survive your own scrutiny when the market’s applause quiets down.