Wealth & Money Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw skewers one of the most stubborn human reflexes: mistaking the absence of your pain for the presence of someone else’s bliss. The toothache is a small, almost comic torment, but that’s the point. It’s vivid, bodily, hard to philosophize away. When your mouth throbs, the world sorts itself into two categories: sufferers and the miraculously unbothered. Shaw then snaps the metaphor into social class, exposing how quickly physical discomfort becomes a template for moral fantasy.

The subtext is less “rich people aren’t happy” than “envy runs on bad epistemology.” The poor don’t just resent wealth; they misread it as a permanent anesthetic, a life without the grinding irritations that define ordinary existence. Shaw’s jab lands because it’s symmetrical: the toothache sufferer and the poverty-stricken man commit the same interpretive error. That even-handedness is classic Shaw - socialist in politics, but allergic to sentimental scapegoats. He refuses the easy villain of the “happy rich” and targets the mental shortcut that keeps everyone stupid and polarized.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in a Britain where wealth inequality was stark and moralized, and where the poor were encouraged to see prosperity as virtue and their own hardship as failure. By framing poverty as a kind of ache, he implies it’s real, immediate, and not redeemed by character-building myths. The line is ultimately a warning about projection: pain narrows the imagination, and narrow imaginations are politically useful to people who prefer the poor angry at the rich rather than curious about the machinery that produces both toothaches and poverty.