WEALTH QUOTES
quotations about wealth
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- Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
- Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, "The Deserted Village"
Wealth makes an ugly person beautiful to look on and an incoherent speech eloquent; and wealth alone can enjoy pleasure even in sickness and can conceal its miseries.
SOPHOCLES, The Sons of Aleus [fragment]
There is a saying that no man has tasted the full flavour of life until he has known poverty, love and war. The justness of this reflection commends it to the lover of condensed philosophy. The three conditions embrace about all there is in life worth knowing. A surface thinker might deem that wealth should be added to the list. Not so. When a poor man finds a long-hidden quarter-dollar that has slipped through a rip into his vest lining, he sounds the pleasure of life with a deeper plummet than any millionaire can hope to cast.
O. HENRY, "The Complete Life of John Hopkins"
Wealth held by a class and used ambitiously becomes as despotic as an absolute monarchy, and has in its hands manners, customs, laws, institutions, and governments themselves.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Wealth is nothing more or less than a tool to do things with. It is like the fuel that runs the furnace or the belt that runs the wheel -- only a means to an end.
HENRY FORD, Theosophist Magazine, Feb. 1930
The first wealth is health.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Power," The Conduct of Life
In every well-governed state, wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
ANATOLE FRANCE, Penguin Island
Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth -- the soil and the labourer.
Wealth which breeds idleness ... is only a sort of human oyster-bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worm's banquet.
HORACE MANN, A Few Thoughts for a Young Man
Behind the deceptive words designed to entice people into supporting violence -- words like democracy, freedom, self-defense, national security -- there is the reality of enormous wealth in the hands of a few, while billions of people in the world are hungry, sick, homeless.
HOWARD ZINN, preface, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Competition, founded upon the conflicting interests of individuals, is in reality far less productive of wealth and enterprise than co-operation, involving though it does the constant apparent sacrifice of the individual to the common interests.
ROBERT HUGH BENSON, A City Set on a Hill
There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE, Doctor Thorne
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, Jul. 12, 2006
Real estate is at the core of almost every business, and it's certainly at the core of most people's wealth. In order to build your wealth and improve your business smarts, you need to know about real estate.
DONALD TRUMP, Think Like a Billionaire
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty
My conception of America is a land where men and women may walk in ordered freedom in the independent conduct of their occupations; where they may enjoy the advantages of wealth, not concentrated in the hands of the few but spread through the lives of all; where they build and safeguard their homes, and give to their children the fullest advantages and opportunities of American life; where every man shall be respected in the faith that his conscience and his heart direct him to follow; where a contented and happy people, secure in their liberties, free from poverty and fear, shall have the leisure and impulse to seek a fuller life.
HERBERT HOOVER, speech, Oct. 22, 1928
We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.
If you do not appreciate what you now have you will never appreciate what you will have.
He who has wealth has friends.
CHANAKYA, Vridda-Chanakya
Wealth is power, and power is the only thing about which contemporary culture cares.
- Three courses open lie to wealth, to give, enjoy, or lose,
- Who shrinketh from the former two, perforce the third doth choose.
Great wealth may be to its owner a blessing or a curse. Alas! I fear it is too often the latter. It hardens the heart, blunts the finer susceptibilities, and transforms into a fiend what under more favourable circumstances might have been a human being.
ARNOLD BENNETT, A Question of Sex
The wealthy seldom possess wealth: oftener they are possessed by it.
- The loss of wealth is loss of dirt,
- As sages of all times assert;
- The happy man's without a shirt.
JOHN HEYWOOD, Be Merry Friends
- Once more, in the matter of wealth: if thou throw thine all on a chance,
- Men will come around thee, and wait, and watch the turning of the wheel;
- And if, in the lottery of life, thou draw a splendid prize,
- What foresight hadst thou, and skill! yea, what enterprize and wisdom!
- But, if it fall out against thee, and thou fail in thy perilous endeavour,
- Behold, the simple did sow, and hath reaped the right harvest of his folly.
- And the world will be gladly excused, nor will reach out a finger to help;
- For why should this speculative dullard be a whirlpool to all around him?
- Go to, let him sink by himself: we knew what the end of it would be.
- For the man hath missed his mark, and his fellows look no further.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER, Proverbial Philosophy
Poor is the man who can boast of nothing more than gold.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY, Proverbs
The way to cure hatred of the rich is to accumulate some property yourself.
Wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.
FRANK HERBERT, God Emperor of Dune
It is far more easy to acquire a fortune like a knave, than to expend it, like a gentleman.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON, Lacon
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, "The Rich Boy"
Being wealthy when no one else is is like being the only one at the party with a drink.
TIM ALLEN, Esquire, Nov. 2011
That which can be lost cannot be deemed riches.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
- Let none admire
- That riches grow in Hell; that soil may best
- Deserve the precious bane.
JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost
He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Browse Wealth Quotes II
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