Riches may enable us to confer favours, but

Riches may enable us to confer favours, but to confer them with propriety and grace requires a something that riches cannot give.

As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.
- Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979