So we should use the tough, fighting virtues when we're poor. When we're rich, we should use the gentler virtues that move easily and just carry their own weight. Given this difference, I'd rather deal with virtues I can practice in peace than ones I can only test through struggle and hardship. "This is why," says the wise man, "I don't say one thing and do another. But you don't really understand what I'm saying. You only hear the sound of my words. You don't try to figure out what they actually mean."
We ought, therefore, to apply these energetic, combative virtues to poverty, and to riches those other more thrifty ones which trip lightly along, and merely support their own weight. This being the distinction between them, I would rather have to deal with those which I could practise in comparative quiet, than those of which one can only make trial through blood and sweat. "Wherefore," says the sage, "I do not talk one way and live another: but you do not rightly understand what I say: the sound of my words alone reaches your ears, you do not try to find out their meaning."