Wealth & Money Quote by Marc Chagall

Chagall takes a knife to the modern assumption that work is a transaction. For him, labor isn’t a means to money; money is the thin byproduct of a deeper obligation: to make existence defensible. Coming from an artist who spent his life turning memory, mysticism, and dislocation into color, the line reads less like a motivational poster and more like an existential ledger. If life is absurdly brief, historically violent, and often humiliating, then the only credible response is to build something that can stand next to it.

The subtext is both stern and oddly tender. “Justify” implies a trial: life has to be argued for, proven, made legible. That pressure lands hardest on artists, whose work is routinely treated as indulgence unless it sells. Chagall flips the indictment. The real indulgence is living without making meaning; the real poverty is a life that can’t account for itself except in wages.

Context matters: Chagall’s century was a machine for stripping life of justification - pogroms, revolutions, exile, two world wars. In that world, “making money” is survival, but it’s not explanation. His sentence insists on a second kind of survival: the kind that refuses to let catastrophe have the last word. Work, in this frame, is not hustle; it’s testimony. It’s how you turn days into something that doesn’t evaporate when the paychecks stop.