Meaning of “A man is rich in proportion to the…”

Walden, “Economy”; wording lightly normalized from the surrounding sentence.

Thrift, Chapter V, “Examples of Thrift,” Project Gutenberg #14418. In the chapter’s opening discussion of domestic management, Smiles develops thrift as orderly use of household resources and then calls it the spirit of order in human life.

The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, maxim 14, in Darius Lyman’s 1856 English rendering; maxim order can vary across editions.

Moral printed after “The Widow and the Sheep”; the widow injures the sheep while trying to avoid the shearer’s expense.

Thrift, Chapter II, “Habits of Thrift,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles says thrift requires neither exceptional courage nor intellect but ordinary common sense, resistance to selfish enjoyment and patient self-denial.

The Art of Money Getting, unheaded opening economy discussion before the first formal contents section, Project Gutenberg #8581. “True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go” follows Barnum’s contrast between real economy and penny-wise meanness and leads into his margin-of-income example. The queue parser’s inherited “rule i” hint is not a printed heading in this witness. This remains nineteenth-century conduct-of-life and financial rhetoric, not individualized financial planning or a guaranteed savings rule.