Wealth & Money Quote by Euripides

Euripides hands you a paradox that isn’t meant to be solved so much as endured. “Youth is the best time to be rich, and the best time to be poor” works because it refuses the tidy moral math Greeks were supposed to learn: virtue rewarded, hubris punished, prosperity justified. Instead, it suggests that the real variable isn’t money. It’s time.

In youth, wealth is “best” not because it buys wisdom, but because it buys momentum. Riches amplify appetite: travel, training, status, lovers, the whole civic theater of being seen. Youth can convert cash into experience with very little drag from illness, regret, or narrowed options. That’s the seduction.

But Euripides’ second clause is the knife. Youth is also the best time to be poor because the consequences of deprivation are, perversely, less final. The young can endure hunger, sleep badly, improvise, start over, and still be “becoming” rather than “declining.” Poverty later in life reads as a verdict; in youth it can still masquerade as a chapter. The line isn’t romanticizing hardship so much as acknowledging resilience as a kind of temporary credit.

Euripides wrote in an Athens where war and political turmoil could flip fortunes fast, where the chorus often speaks for people one disaster away from ruin. The subtext is pragmatic, almost bleak: the gods and the polis are unstable, so anchor your expectations in the only advantage that doesn’t depend on luck. Youth makes both extremes survivable, and neither extreme safe.