War & Peace Quote by Humayun Ahmed

Peace of mind gets framed here as a kind of contrarian luxury: not the shiny, accumulable stuff people chase, but the quiet internal condition that makes everything else either usable or pointless. Humayun Ahmed was a novelist who understood how ordinary lives get quietly wrecked by anxiety, social obligation, and the pressure to perform success. So the line reads less like a greeting-card platitude and more like a hard-earned correction to the cultural math that treats money, status, and achievement as the final scoreboard.

The subtext is almost domestic in its bite. “Greatest wealth” borrows the language of capitalism and flips it, as if to say: if you insist on keeping life in the ledger-book format, fine - here’s the only asset that actually compounds. Peace of mind doesn’t just feel good; it changes the quality of perception. It’s what allows love to be received, work to be meaningful, grief to be survivable. Without it, even abundance becomes a noisy room you can’t leave.

Placed in Ahmed’s context - writing in a society where middle-class aspiration, family duty, and public reputation can tighten like a vise - the sentence signals an ethical stance as much as a personal one. It resists the idea that a life must be “impressive” to be worthwhile. The intent is quietly radical: redefine prosperity as inner stability, then watch the rest of the cultural script lose its grip.