Wealth & Money Quote by Arnold Bennett

Ingenuity is Bennett's preferred currency, and he frames it with the brisk pragmatism of someone who watched a modern consumer society being born. The line flatters the scrappy mind, but it also needles the complacent rich: money alone, he implies, is a blunt instrument in an era that rewards invention, hustle, and taste. "Vastly more" does double duty, turning thrift into a kind of moral arithmetic while also promising something more seductive than virtue: fun.

The pairing of "profitable and amusing" is the tell. Bennett isn't preaching asceticism or romantic poverty; he's selling the pleasure of mastery. Ingenuity converts constraints into play, making the small budget an engine for experiments, side doors, and clever workarounds. That is why "a little money" stays in the sentence: pure resourcefulness without any means can become misery, not sport. He endorses the middle zone where limits are real but not crushing - the conditions that force creativity to show its hand.

Context matters. Bennett wrote through late-Victorian solidity into early 20th-century upheaval, when new industries, mass marketing, and shifting class structures made "self-made" feel newly plausible and newly mythologized. The subtext is aspirational but not naive: ingenuity is both survival skill and social leverage. By making wealth without brains sound boring, Bennett reframes class advantage as a failure of imagination - a quietly radical insult dressed up as common sense.