Life & Wisdom Quote by Logan P. Smith

“Few sorrows” is a sly bait-and-switch: Logan P. Smith opens with the language of tragedy, then smuggles in a ledger. The line’s power comes from how calmly it commits a small heresy against sentimental culture. We’re trained to insist that money can’t buy happiness, that grief is pure and untouched by economics. Smith doesn’t deny sorrow; he punctures the piety around it. Even “however poignant” reads like a nod to the real thing, an acknowledgment that pain isn’t trivial. Then the sentence turns, and the cynicism lands with an almost bureaucratic neatness: income is “of avail,” a phrase that treats emotional life like a problem that can be mitigated, if not solved, with resources.

The intent isn’t to praise greed so much as to expose how class quietly scripts our private suffering. Money can’t stop death, betrayal, illness, loneliness; but it can buy time, privacy, treatment, distance, discretion, options. It can turn catastrophe into inconvenience, transform “I can’t” into “I’d rather not.” That’s the subtext: what we call resilience is often just solvency, and what we romanticize as noble endurance is frequently forced scarcity.

Contextually, Smith writes from an early 20th-century British world where social rank and financial security were openly intertwined with dignity. The joke is genteel, but the critique is sharp: moralizing about money’s limits is easiest when you already have it. The line still stings because it refuses comforting fables and insists on the unsexy truth that cash doesn’t ennoble you; it cushions you.