Jeanette Winterson put this line in The Passion in 1987, a short novel set during the Napoleonic wars and partially inside the imagined city of Venice. The book is narrated by a soldier and a web-footed woman who falls in love with a married countess, neither of whom would recognize the epigram industry that has since lifted this sentence out of the story. Inside the novel, it is said quietly.

The line is a kind of forensic instrument. You can talk about your values for a long time without telling anyone anything about yourself. Risk is the audit. The only honest record of what you actually value is the record of what you have been willing to lose for it. Time, comfort, reputation, money, sleep. If nothing on the list has ever been at stake, the value was rhetorical. Winterson, writing about a woman who bet her heart at the worst possible moment, knew this.

A sphinx cat sitting on a balcony railing three stories up, tail straight, perfectly calm while looking at a golden hour skyline, is making a small bet most humans would not. The risk reveals what the cat values: the view, the angle, the narrow platform as its own reward. We tend to stay indoors and call it prudence. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is just a quiet admission that we could not think of anything we wanted badly enough.