Wealth & Money Quote by Gilbert Highet

A swipe at modern ambition disguised as moral housekeeping, Highet’s line lands because it treats “power” and “wealth” not as sins, but as category errors. The target isn’t money itself; it’s the reflex to grow for growth’s sake, to keep extending the perimeter of the self until the self disappears. That “beyond his needs” clause is the knife twist: it concedes legitimacy to comfort and security, then indicts the surplus chase as a kind of spiritual mismanagement.

Highet’s rhetorical move is to reframe what counts as property. Calling the soul an “imperishable possession” borrows the language of capitalism to undermine capitalism’s promise. The subtext is that the only asset that can’t be devalued by inflation, decay, or public opinion is interior life: character, taste, conscience, attention. It’s a classic humanist inversion, and it works because it doesn’t beg you to renounce the world; it asks you to stop mistaking accumulation for meaning.

Context matters: Highet was a mid-century literary critic steeped in classical education, writing in an era when mass consumer culture and corporate life were becoming default scripts for success. The quote reads like a defense of the humanities against the utilitarian drumbeat: education as enrichment of the person, not optimization of the résumé. “Enjoy” is doing a lot of work, too. This isn’t monkish self-denial; it’s a plea for cultivated pleasure, the kind that outlasts purchases because it changes the one doing the enjoying.