Quote by Tiruvalluvar: “Of all wealth, virtue is the greatest wealth.”

Material possessions can be lost, stolen, or used up. But a person's ethical character — their honesty, kindness, and integrity — is the kind of wealth that no circumstance can take away, and that enriches everyone it touches.

The Kural's opening books on virtue (Aram) establish an ethical framework that underpins everything that follows. In the commercial and maritime world of ancient Tamil South India, where trade brought considerable material wealth, this claim that virtue outranks all possessions was both a moral and a social statement.

Ancient Tamil poet and philosopher, author of the Kural, a collection of 1,330 couplets on ethics, politics, love, and spiritual life that is among the most celebrated works in Tamil literature. Believed to have lived between the first and fifth centuries CE in present-day Tamil Nadu, his exact dates remain uncertain. The Kural is sometimes called the Tamil Veda for its cultural and moral authority.