Wealth & Money Quote by Saadi

Saadi is running a moral heist: he steals status from both classes and gives it back as character. The line flatters no one in the way people want to be flattered. The rich aren’t praised for being rich; they’re only salvageable if they can perform an inversion of power, carrying themselves with the self-restraint, modesty, and dependence on others that poverty teaches. The poor aren’t sanctified for suffering; they’re “best loved” only if they can generate an inner abundance - magnanimity - that refuses the cramped psychology of scarcity.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how class usually behaves. Wealth tends to produce entitlement, a loud selfhood that assumes the world is a purchase. Poverty, especially when prolonged, can breed defensiveness and suspicion, a necessary armor that can harden into resentment. Saadi’s pairing is surgical: humility is the virtue most difficult for the rich because it requires surrendering the social script that wealth writes for them; magnanimity is the virtue most difficult for the poor because it asks for generosity without the material security that makes generosity easy.

In Saadi’s Persianate medieval context, this is also a Sufi-inflected reordering of value: God’s favor doesn’t track social hierarchy, and piety is measured by how you metabolize your station. The quote works because it refuses the cheap comfort of choosing a side. It imagines a society where the real aristocracy is temperament, and the real poverty is a small heart.