If you count all your assets, you always show a profit.

Quillen’s line borrows the language of bookkeeping to make a moral-psychological point: whether one feels “in profit” or “in loss” depends on what one chooses to count. If you tally only debts—failures, disappointments, what you lack—life looks like a deficit. But if you include all assets—health, skills, friendships, opportunities, past joys, hard-won experience—your balance sheet changes. The aphorism encourages a deliberate, comprehensive self-inventory as a corrective to pessimism and narrow self-judgment. It also hints that gratitude is partly an accounting practice: prosperity is not only what you earn, but what you recognize you already possess.