Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton builds a sly little hierarchy of wealth, then swaps out money at the last second. The line borrows the language of commerce - "acquiring", "best acquisition" - only to redirect it toward friendships and books, two things that stubbornly resist being treated like property. That tension is the point: he flatters the upward-striving reader who likes to count their gains, then quietly rewires what a "gain" ought to be.

The ranking matters. Friends come first, which keeps the sentiment from collapsing into the lonely bibliophile fantasy that reading can replace human life. But books are placed "next to" friends because they simulate some of what friendship offers: conversation across time, moral calibration, the feeling of being accompanied. Colton is pitching books not as decoration or trivia but as portable society - a private network you can consult when actual people fail you, or when your circle is too small to challenge you.

Contextually, this is early-19th-century self-culture talk: a Britain thick with circulating libraries, rising literacy, and the idea that taste and character can be engineered through the right influences. Colton, a moralizing aphorist, sells improvement in a single sentence. The subtext is aspirational and faintly suspicious of mere status: if you must collect something, collect what will correct you. Friends keep you honest; books keep you sharp. Both, ideally, keep you from becoming the kind of person who only knows how to acquire.