There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.

With dry, epigrammatic wit, Smith suggests that money cannot cure every grief, but it can blunt many of life’s hardships—illness, insecurity, inconvenience, and the humiliations of dependence. The line plays on the conventional moral that wealth is spiritually irrelevant by conceding the opposite: material comfort often changes the texture of suffering, even when it cannot remove its cause. The phrasing (“few sorrows, however poignant”) keeps a narrow door open for irreparable losses—death, betrayal, existential despair—while insisting that most everyday misery is at least partly practical. The remark is less a celebration of greed than a skeptical observation about how closely emotional well-being is tied to economic stability.