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Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Helps

"The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice"

About this Quote

Money, Helps suggests, doesn’t just buy comfort; it buys silence. “The greatest luxury” isn’t velvet or villas, but the ability to duck the relentless drip of “good advice” - the moralizing, the managing, the unsolicited coaching that arrives whenever someone thinks you’re reachable. The line lands because it flips the usual Victorian pieties: instead of riches making you better, they make you ungovernable.

“Good advice” is the key sly phrase. Helps isn’t attacking wisdom; he’s skewering the social ritual of advice as a form of control. Advice often arrives dressed as benevolence but functions as surveillance: a way for families, churches, committees, and busybodies to keep people within acceptable bounds. Riches create distance - literal (gates, travel, privacy) and social (status that discourages meddling). If you can’t be summoned, cornered, or financially pressured, you can’t be managed.

As a nineteenth-century historian and civil servant in Britain, Helps would have watched the era’s booming middle-class confidence: improvement societies, earnest reformers, the cult of self-help. Advice was practically a national pastime, intertwined with respectability and the assumption that other people’s lives were a public project. His irony is crisp: the wealthy are not just insulated from hardship, they’re insulated from the very sermonizing that defines “proper” society.

The subtext is darker than a one-liner about annoying relatives. It’s a note on power. The freedom to ignore good advice is the freedom to ignore accountability - and that, Helps implies, is what affluence really purchases.

Quote Details

TopicWealth
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Helps, Arthur. (2026, January 17). The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-greatest-luxury-of-riches-is-that-they-enable-29935/

Chicago Style
Helps, Arthur. "The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-greatest-luxury-of-riches-is-that-they-enable-29935/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/the-greatest-luxury-of-riches-is-that-they-enable-29935/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.

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The Greatest Luxury of Riches - Arthur Helps
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Arthur Helps (July 10, 1813 - March 7, 1875) was a Historian from United Kingdom.

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