Wealth & Money Quote by Edward Young

The line lands like a polished paradox: the more you accumulate, the more your confidence should leak out. Young is writing in the 18th-century moral-poetic mode where aphorism doubles as social critique, and he uses that era's favorite weapon: humiliation dressed as wisdom. "Much learning" doesn’t crown the scholar; it exposes the horizon of ignorance that education keeps pushing outward. Knowledge expands the perimeter of what you can see you don't know, turning the learned person into a map of limits. That’s not anti-intellectualism so much as an attack on intellectual vanity.

Then he swivels to money, and the phrasing bites: "how little wordings enjoy". Whether read as a jab at "worldlings" (the worldly) or a misprinted "mortals", the target is the same - people who confuse possession with pleasure. Wealth, Young implies, is uniquely good at making its owner anxious, managerial, and emotionally dehydrated. The rich may own more, but they often enjoy less, because enjoyment requires surrender, not control.

Subtext: Young is disciplining the rising culture of status - the Enlightenment's faith in progress and a commercial society's faith in accumulation. His couplet punctures the fantasy that either study or money delivers mastery. It’s a poem-sized memento mori: what looks like ascent is also exposure. The more "much" you get, the more you confront the stubborn smallness of the human animal holding it.