Life & Wisdom Quote by Johann Georg Zimmermann

Zimmermann is doing that very 18th-century trick of taking a prized social good - money, status, luck - and flipping it until it looks like a trap. The line isn’t a moralistic scold so much as a cool diagnostic: “fortune” isn’t just cash, it’s the whole apparatus of favor and visibility that drags character into negotiation. Ruin arrives not because wealth is inherently corrupting, but because it changes the incentives around you faster than your self-concept can adapt. Suddenly you’re managing appetites, dependents, reputation, and fear of loss. That’s a workload with a psychological tax.

The sharper move is the second clause: plenty “escape ruin” through the want of fortune. Poverty, in this framing, can function as protection - not noble, not romantic, but strategically limiting. If you can’t buy influence, you also can’t be bought as easily; if you can’t climb, you don’t have to contort yourself to keep climbing. Zimmermann is describing deprivation as a kind of enforced integrity, or at least enforced simplicity.

“To obtain it the great have become little, and the little great” is the social knife-twist. He’s pointing at the humiliations required to win favor: aristocrats lowering themselves into flattery, compromise, or petty scheming; nobodies rising by mastering those same skills. Greatness and littleness aren’t fixed ranks here, they’re behaviors. In a Europe of patronage, court politics, and professional dependence, “fortune” is less reward than a system that quietly rewrites your scale of values.