quotations about wealth
The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Wealth oft-times killeth, where want but hindered the budding.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Wealth is useless on the day of wrath, but virtue saves from death.
PROVERBS 11:4
What is it to be rich? It is to have an assured income in excess of expenditures, and to have no occasion for anxiety for the morrow. It is to be above the necessity of living from hand to mouth. It is to be able (or to have grounds to insanely suppose one's self to be able) to live outside of God's providence.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments
Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Wealth is what's here on the premises. If I open a cupboard and see, say, thirty cans of tomato sauce and a five-pound bag of rice, I get a little thrill of well-being -- much more so than if I take a look at the quarterly dividend report from my mutual fund.
GARRISON KEILLOR
attributed, The Times Book of Quotations
The effect of the concentration of wealth is to yield concentration of power.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Requiem for the American Dream
Many men want wealth--not a competence alone, but a five-story competence. Every thing subserves this; and religion they would like as a sort of lightning rod to their houses, to ward off, by and by, the bolts of divine wrath.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
The wealthy have nothing left except money.
GEORGE ADE
"The Fable of the Misdirected Sympathy and the Come-Back of the Proud Steam-Fitter", True Bills
Poor is the man who can boast of nothing more than gold.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
A man can hardly be said to have made a fortune if he does not know how to enjoy it.
LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES
Reflections and Maxims
Small aid is wealth for daily gladness; once a man be done with hunger, rich and poor are all as one.
EURIPIDES
Electra
Jesus and the apostles nowhere speak of wealth as a thing to be prayed for. They nowhere characterize wealth as a blessing, or the accumulation of it, by enterprise and industry, as praiseworthy. The new dispensation nowhere promises either riches or long life to the righteous: it promises eternal life and treasures in heaven. The "poverty" which Jesus calls "blessed" consists, not in penury and the lack of the necessaries of life, but in abundance or non-abundance, with a knowledge that the abundance, if there be abundance, is the gratuitious gift of God; and also the knowledge, if there be non-abundance, that "whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth."
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments
There has always been a display of wealth and always will be, until the depression comes, which it always does. And let me tell you, a display is a good thing. It shows people that you can be successful. It can show you a way of life.
DONALD TRUMP
interview, Playboy, March 1990
Nought is there in wealth
That serves as bulwark 'gainst the subtle stealth
Of Destiny and Doom.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
Nothing keeps longer than a middling fortune, and nothing melts away sooner than a large one.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of the Gifts of Fortune", Les Caractères
There's a common misconception that wealth is a fixed pie, and that therefore for one person to have a lot of wealth requires somebody else to have less (the narrative often goes that wealthy people stole their wealth from poor and middle class people) ... [but] wealth can grow, so that even if someone's percentage of the pie remains the same, they will benefit from that individual slice getting bigger.
IAN TARTT
"Bernie Sanders on the Koch Brothers and Libertarian Ideas", The Libertarian Republic, April 18, 2017
As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Any man can become rich who is base enough to keep a brothel, a gin palace, or a gambling house.
CHARLES WILLIAM DAY
The Maxims, Experiences, and Observations of Agogos
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. And it will leave you unfulfilled.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, July 12, 2006