Wealth & Money Quote by Edward Young

Young frames fortune as weather: arbitrary, drifting, and indifferent to merit. Titles and estates "drop down" like rain from clouds, an image that makes inherited status feel less like achievement than precipitation. Even "wealth" is given agency, as if money can come hunting for its next owner. That sly personification isn’t just decorative; it exposes a social order where rank and riches often arrive through accident, inheritance, patronage, or royal favor - mechanisms as impersonal as the sky.

Then the line pivots on a hard moral asymmetry: wisdom is the one thing that won’t fall into your lap. The verb shift matters. Titles drop. Wealth seeks. Wisdom "must be sought". Young turns effort into a kind of ethical proof, suggesting that what costs you something is what can actually belong to you. It’s also a quiet rebuke to a culture that confuses being well-born with being well-made.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in early-18th-century Britain, Young lived inside the patronage economy, where poets could be rewarded - or ignored - by the powerful. The quote reads like the disenchanted wisdom of someone who watched status being dispensed as social currency, not moral recognition. As a poet with religious and philosophical preoccupations (and later, a major voice in the graveyard tradition), Young is staking out a hierarchy of value: outward honors are contingent and theatrical; inward understanding is earned, private, and resistant to purchase.

The subtext is almost democratic: you can’t control the clouds, but you can choose the chase.