Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton’s line is a neat little moral trap: it pretends to talk about money, then quietly moves the argument into desire, where the real accounting happens. “Wealth,” he insists, isn’t a pile of assets but a ratio - what you have divided by what you think you need. That’s a shrewd rhetorical maneuver, because it makes the reader complicit. If you feel defensive, it’s not because he insulted your bank balance; it’s because he questioned your appetites.

The phrasing is built for inversion. “He that has little and wants less” is a deliberately unglamorous figure, almost anonymous, yet Colton crowns him “richer.” The second character - “he that has much and wants more” - is the one we’d normally envy, but the sentence flips envy into pity. Colton isn’t romanticizing poverty so much as weaponizing comparison: the misery of “much” comes from the endless treadmill of “more.” It’s an early diagnosis of what we’d now call lifestyle inflation, status anxiety, and the way consumption turns into a moving target.

Context matters. Writing in the early 19th century, Colton is steeped in Christian-inflected moralism and a Georgian/Regency culture where social rank was visible, competitive, and expensive to maintain. The subtext: modernity is manufacturing new wants faster than it can produce contentment. His intent isn’t to shame comfort; it’s to relocate “riches” from the marketplace to the interior life, where the hardest luxury to buy is enough.