To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Interpretation
Desiring wealth may require a certain lack of wisdom or understanding about its true value.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote suggests an ironic observation about money and intelligence. It implies that the pursuit of wealth can lead individuals into foolishness, as they may focus solely on material gain without recognizing its potential pitfalls or the deeper values in life. The cleverness needed to accumulate wealth often comes at the expense of wisdom, as those who desire money may overlook more meaningful pursuits.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of wealth and happiness.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
It is not until we have passed through the furnace that we are made to know how much dross there is in our composition.
I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do - and not only for operating, but for everything.
If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, youβve lived it twice.
Really, every woman is an example to me, because as women we go through so much pain. We have to live this perfect life when we are messed up inside. We all go through trials and tribulations.
Grant what thou commandest and then command what thou wilt.
. . . Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed . . . so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger.
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