Wealth & Money Quote by George A. Smith

Prosperity isn’t the villain here; misdirected devotion is. George A. Smith, speaking as a 19th-century clergyman and moral governor of a community, frames material wealth not as a neutral tool but as a training ground for the soul. His phrasing makes the psychology feel almost mechanical: if the heart "finds life" in money, it will "go farther". The line is built on escalation. Wealth is the gateway drug, not the terminal offense.

The intent is pastoral and disciplinary at once. Smith isn’t merely warning against greed; he’s diagnosing a chain reaction where appetite teaches appetite. Money becomes an early, socially respectable hunger that, once normalized, spills into "base and sullen" desires - language that carries both moral judgment and emotional weather. "Base" signals degradation; "sullen" hints at the mood of a person who has trained themselves to be perpetually unsatisfied. The subtext is that indulgence doesn’t produce joy; it produces irritability, entitlement, and a resentful sense that life is always withholding.

Context matters. In Smith’s era, American expansion and market capitalism were remaking daily life, and for Latter-day Saint leaders especially, wealth could threaten communal cohesion and spiritual hierarchy. This sentence functions as a social technology: it tells listeners that the pursuit of status and comfort won’t stay neatly in the realm of accounting. It will rewrite character. The rhetoric tightens the moral vise by implying inevitability ("usually certain"), turning a personal choice into a predictable moral trajectory - a warning designed to stop the slide early, before desire becomes identity.