Daily Inspiration Quote by Terence

Money, in Terence's hands, is less a prize than a personality test. The line flips the usual moral math: riches are not intrinsically corrupting or ennobling; they’re inert until a human mind turns them into something. That’s a playwright’s move, not a philosopher’s lecture. Terence is staging wealth as a prop that exposes character, a device that lets comedy show its teeth: the same pile of coins can fund generosity, vanity, or self-destruction depending on who’s holding it.

The subtext is quietly accusatory. It refuses to let the rich hide behind fate ("I was lucky") or the poor hide behind purity ("I’m virtuous because I lack"). Value is psychological and ethical, not merely economic. "Blessings" and "curses" are deliberately loaded terms, almost religious, but the mechanism is practical: know-how. Wealth demands competence - judgment, restraint, taste, timing - or it turns into a solvent that dissolves priorities and relationships.

Context matters: Roman New Comedy loved domestic economies, inheritances, dowries, and the social chaos of mismanaged desire. Terence wrote for an urban audience that knew how quickly status could be bought, lost, borrowed, or performed. So the line reads like advice and like a punchline setup: if riches reveal the possessor’s mind, then the real comedy is watching people insist they’re in control while their money writes the plot.