Wealth & Money Quote by E. M. Forster

Money, Forster suggests, doesn’t just purchase things; it hijacks attention. The “evil” here isn’t greed in the pantomime-villain sense. It’s the quieter moral and psychological drift that happens when the medium becomes the message. Currency is supposed to be a tool, a proxy for value, but it has a way of turning into the object of desire itself. You stop seeing the meal and start seeing the receipt. You stop asking what a life is for and start asking what it costs.

Forster’s line works because it frames money as a kind of optical illusion: it tempts us to “look at it” rather than through it. That verb matters. Looking at money implies fascination with the symbol, the tally, the status-marker - the comforting clarity of numbers. Looking at “the things that it buys” means messier, embodied experience: pleasure, comfort, art, time, care. Those are harder to quantify, easier to devalue, and more likely to implicate you ethically. A bank balance can feel clean; what it enables (or displaces) can be morally complicated.

Contextually, Forster is writing from a Britain stratified by class and inheritance, where money isn’t just purchasing power but a social passport. As a novelist of manners with a humanist streak, he keeps circling the ways systems deform intimacy: how property and propriety turn relationships into transactions. The subtext is almost diagnostic: a culture that fixates on money as an end will gradually lose the capacity to recognize ends at all - only means, endlessly accumulating, endlessly justified.