Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

Holmes’s epigram turns a biblical-sounding warning (“put not your trust in…”) into a practical moral about wealth. The first clause cautions against treating money as a source of security, character, or ultimate reliability—an object of faith that can fail, corrupt, or vanish. The second clause pivots to stewardship: if you have money, place it “in trust,” i.e., under fiduciary restraint, planned responsibility, or a purpose beyond immediate self-indulgence. The wit lies in the reversal: distrust money as a god, but use it as a tool—managed, safeguarded, and directed toward obligations to family, community, or posterity.