Health Quote by Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet

Temple lands the blow with a bit of moral aikido: he takes wealth, the thing most people assume buys wellness, and flips it into a liability. The line isn’t aimed at the poor; it’s a warning shot across the bow of comfort. “Exercise and abstinence” reads like old-school hygiene advice, but the real target is indulgence masquerading as success. If money removes friction from daily life, it also removes the accidental disciplines that keep a body functioning: walking instead of riding, hunger instead of grazing, necessity instead of novelty.

The subtext is almost taunting. To “live as if he were poor” isn’t a call for performative minimalism; it’s an accusation that rich life, left to its defaults, tends toward excess and softness. Temple implies that health is less a purchase than a practice, and that privilege makes that practice harder because it makes self-denial optional. Wealth expands choice; it also expands temptation, and temptation is framed here as the true pathogen of the upper class.

Contextually, this fits a long moral tradition in British religious and social thought that treated luxury as corrosive, not just spiritually but physiologically. It also anticipates a modern irony: today’s wellness industry sells expensive “abstinence” (clean eating, fasting protocols, boutique fitness) back to affluent consumers. Temple’s sting is that the body still wants the same boring constraints it always did; the rich just have to reintroduce them on purpose.