Wealth & Money Quote by William Blake

Blake turns prudence from a virtue into a punchline: not a wise guide, but a "rich, ugly, old maid" whose only suitor is "incapacity". The insult is doing philosophical work. By feminizing and aging prudence into a socially undesirable figure, he exposes how easily a culture flatters cautiousness as respectable while quietly admitting it lacks charm, courage, or imaginative heat. "Rich" matters as much as "ugly": prudence offers security, inheritance, the warm house of what already exists. If you can’t make anything new, at least you can protect what you have.

The line is classic Blake in miniature, written against the moral accounting of his era: a late-18th-century Britain where bourgeois self-control and religious propriety were increasingly treated as proof of goodness, and where the French Revolution’s shockwaves made caution look like sanity. Blake, a poet of prophetic intensity, saw that same caution as spiritual anemia. "Courted by incapacity" suggests the real romance here is between timidity and self-justification: people who feel unequal to risk rebrand their limitation as virtue. Prudence becomes an alibi.

The wit is acidic because it targets a moral vanity. Prudence doesn’t merely restrain; it seduces those who fear failure, offering them status without the humiliation of trying. Blake’s subtext is that prudence, when worshipped, is not wisdom but a socially approved form of surrender - a way to look responsible while refusing the dangerous business of desire, vision, and change.