Frugality is misery in disguise.

Taken at face value, the line warns that what is praised as “frugality” can sometimes be a socially acceptable mask for deprivation or joyless self-denial. It suggests a distinction between prudent economy (spending thoughtfully) and a harsher condition in which scarcity—or an obsession with saving—produces a life that feels like “misery,” merely renamed as virtue. Read this way, the aphorism is less an attack on moderation than a critique of miserliness and of moralizing poverty: calling hardship “frugality” does not change its human cost. The sting of the formulation fits the tradition of Roman sententiae that expose hypocrisy by compressing a moral insight into a paradox.