Wealth & Money Quote by Edward Cocker

Honor and money, Cocker suggests, are the kind of currencies that can crash overnight. The line opens like a weather report for a society in moral recession: "Honor's sun declines" is a deliberately public image, as if reputation were daylight itself, something you assume will be there until it isn’t. "Wealth takes wings" is sharper still: money doesn’t just disappear, it flies off, implying both speed and a certain betrayal. The first half is a paired warning about status and security as unstable, easily revoked by scandal, bad luck, or shifting power.

Then Cocker pivots to his real pitch: learning as a stubborn, portable asset. "Learning shines" mirrors the earlier sun imagery, but with a crucial difference. Honor is external and communal; it depends on other people agreeing you deserve it. Wealth is material and therefore vulnerable. Learning, by contrast, is internalized. Once it’s earned, it’s harder to confiscate, harder to devalue, harder to outgrow. Calling it "the best of precious things" frames education as a form of wealth that doesn’t rely on inheritance, and as dignity that doesn’t rely on applause.

The context matters: Cocker was a 17th-century English writer best known for arithmetic textbooks, selling practical knowledge to an emerging commercial class. This isn’t ivory-tower idealism. It’s upward-mobility realism: in a world where fortunes and reputations are volatile, skill and literacy function like insurance. The subtext is almost modern: invest in what can’t be repossessed.