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“Money is neither a material to work upon, nor a tool to work with.”
Money facilitates exchange and payment but is distinguished from the materials, tools, and subsistence that directly enable productive work.
Source note: The Wealth of Nations, Book II, Chapter II; Project Gutenberg #3300. Smith is explaining money as part of circulating capital rather than denying its practical usefulness.
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“Wages, profit, and rent, are the three original sources of all revenue, as well as of all exchangeable value.”
Smith separates major forms of income according to labour, stock, and land, providing a historical framework for how revenue is distributed.
Source note: The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VI; Project Gutenberg #3300. The statement is part of Smith’s eighteenth-century theory of price and income distribution.
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“The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”
Smith distinguishes nominal money price from the labour and sacrifice required to acquire something, making cost broader than the number printed on a transaction.
Source note: The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter V; Project Gutenberg #3300. This belongs to Smith’s labour-command discussion of real and nominal price.
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“There is no Wealth but Life.”
Ruskin makes human life and its capacities the final measure of wealth, challenging definitions that treat accumulated money or goods as sufficient evidence of national well-being.
Source note: Unto This Last, fourth essay, first published in Cornhill Magazine in 1860 and collected in book form in 1862; Project Gutenberg #36541. This is Ruskin’s normative political-economy argument, not a modern empirical wealth metric.
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“All things, then, seek the good.”
Boethius frames action as movement toward some perceived good, making the nature of genuine goodness central to understanding desire, purpose, and happiness.
Source note: The Consolation of Philosophy, Book III; H. R. James translation, during the argument that beings pursue preservation, unity, happiness, and ultimately the good.
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“All men by nature desire to know.”
Aristotle treats the desire for knowledge as a basic human tendency, giving curiosity a foundational place in the movement from perception toward understanding.
Source note: Metaphysics, Book I, chapter 1, W. D. Ross translation; the work opens with this claim before discussing sensation, memory, experience, art, and knowledge.