Thornton Wilder

The real sting here isn't that wealth should be generous—plenty of people agree with that platitude. Rather, Wilder's suggesting something odder: that money sitting idle isn't merely selfish, it's *sterile*, literally worthless as a psychological or moral fact. A miser with a vault full of gold has precisely nothing, because wealth only becomes real through its movement, its generative capacity. When a grandfather funds his granddaughter's violin lessons or a business owner invests in an apprentice's wages, the money transforms into something alive—and only then does it matter at all.