Wealth & Money Quote by Jim Harrison

Harrison’s line lands like a hard side-eye at the American religion of winning. “Blinding” is the key verb: success and money aren’t just distracting, they’re sensory impairment. The phrase carries a physicality you can feel - the glare of attention, the flash of status, the sudden overexposure that makes everything else harder to see. He’s not moralizing about wealth in the abstract; he’s warning about what it does to perception, to judgment, to taste.

Coming from Harrison, the subtext is especially pointed. His work circles appetite and excess - sex, food, booze, landscape - not as quaint hedonism but as the messy fact of being alive. Against that worldview, “success” reads as an artificial high: a clean, socially approved intoxication that can replace the rougher, truer forms of experience. Money, paired with success, becomes an accelerant: it doesn’t create blindness by itself so much as it gives your delusions better lighting and a larger stage.

The intent isn’t to scold ambition; it’s to expose its hidden cost. When you’re rewarded loudly, you stop hearing dissent. When you can buy comfort, you stop noticing what discomfort used to teach you. Harrison’s cynicism here is practical, not performative: the real danger isn’t failure, it’s the way triumph can shrink your field of vision until the world looks exactly like your own reflection.