An important clarification

[xiphias]

Money can't buy happiness -- that's true. However, lack-of-money can sure buy misery.

Comments

[fibro-witch.livejournal.com]

Not having enough money to provide for your basic needs is misery. Not having enough money to provide for your wants is not

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

Or, at a minimum, grumpiness.

[unquietsoul5.livejournal.com]

Definitely true.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

This shows up in Leo Rosten's fabulous Joys of Yiddish: "It's not that money makes everything good. It's that the lack of money makes everything bad."

Ain't that the truth.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

There's no shame in being poor...

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

OK, I've been poor, and I was ashamed. Msot people who're broke are ashamed of it in some way.

"There's no shame in being poor"? Try waying "being poor in its self is not a reason to be ashamed". And even then, it never helped me to hear that.

[gilmoure.livejournal.com]

The rest of the line is:

...it's no great honor either.

So speaks the man living in a mud brick house.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The rest of the quote is, ". . . but it's no great honor, either."

[angelovernh.livejournal.com]

Yes, very true.. and then when you get money to alleviate the stresses and worries of not having money it SEEMS to be bringing happiness.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry if my response came off as snarky. I had no ida that was a quote, actually.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It's cultural. gilmoure felt, correctly, that he didn't need to finish the quote, since he could assume that I knew the quote, who said it (Tevye the Milkman, from the stories of Sholom Alechem), what kind of person the quoter was, and what the attitudes towards money that are expressed by it are.

The quote, in that context, means almost precisely the opposite of what the first half of the quote means alone.

It's a recognition that poverty shouldn't be a source of shame -- but that it nonetheless is.