Life & Wisdom Quote by Washington Irving

A neat little trap of a sentence: it sounds like a proverb you’d stitch onto a sampler, then it flips and bites. Irving isn’t really talking about “nothing” in the literal sense. He’s diagnosing a mindset in which satisfaction is structurally impossible. If “enough” already registers as “too little,” then desire can’t be fed; it can only be stoked. The line works because it turns abundance into a kind of poverty: the more you have, the more your internal measuring stick shrinks what you’ve got into insufficiency.

The subtext is moral, but not preachy. Irving is less interested in scolding greed than in exposing its psychology. The man in the quote isn’t wicked so much as trapped in a feedback loop of comparison and appetite. “Enough” is supposed to be a stopping point, a social contract with the self. When that term collapses, life becomes a treadmill: achievement loses its capacity to close the gap between wanting and having.

Context matters. Irving wrote in a young, fast-expanding America where commerce, speculation, and status were becoming national habits, not just private vices. The early republic liked to tell itself it was escaping Old World decadence; Irving’s irony suggests the new world has simply invented fresher reasons to feel deprived. The sentence’s tight circularity mirrors the condition it condemns: desire chasing its own tail, mistaking motion for progress, and calling that restlessness ambition.