Wealth & Money Quote by Albert Camus

Camus lands the line like a cold coin on a table: most people do not get to float above necessity. The aphorism is tidy, almost brutal in its arithmetic, and that’s the point. By pairing “very rich” with “very poor,” he collapses the usual moral distance between them. Both extremes can exist “without a trade,” but for opposite reasons: one because money replaces skill, the other because deprivation strips choice down to mere survival. In the middle sits everyone else, yoked to competence, routine, and the quiet coercion of earning.

The word “trade” matters. Camus doesn’t say “job” or “career,” the modern euphemisms that pretend work is self-expression. “Trade” is older, physical, apprenticed; it implies usefulness and limits. That choice carries subtext: dignity is not automatically conferred by society’s admiration or by your inner life. It’s constructed, often painfully, through a practiced contribution. If you don’t have that, your freedom is either purchased or involuntary.

The line also reads as a sideways critique of romantic posturing. In Camus’s world, the “free” life of the artist, the drifter, the pure thinker is typically subsidized by someone, or else it’s a flirtation with ruin. Coming out of interwar and postwar France, with class stratification and disillusionment in the air, the sentence doubles as a social diagnosis: ideology may be abstract, but the ability to live abstractly is not. Work becomes the unglamorous boundary between existential philosophy and rent.