quotations about wealth
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
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
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
Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.
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
Titles, riches, and fine houses signify no more to the making of one man better than another, than the finer saddle to the making the better horse.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Nought is there in wealth
That serves as bulwark 'gainst the subtle stealth
Of Destiny and Doom.
AESCHYLUS
Agamemnon
There is no road to wealth so easy and respectable as that of matrimony.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Doctor Thorne
Poor is the man who can boast of nothing more than gold.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
The effect of the concentration of wealth is to yield concentration of power.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Requiem for the American Dream
A rich man is one who isn't afraid to ask the salesperson to show him something cheaper.
JACK BENNY
The Jack Benny Program
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
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
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"
The poor know well what wealth can do--
The rich their happiest chances miss;
We sit too close to grasp the view,
Or stand too far to feel the bliss.
CAROLINE SPENCER
"Outside"
Jars neither of wine nor of water shall fail in the houses of the rich.
AESCHYLUS
fragment, Kabeiroi
It is doubtful if even experience of riches and success is as intense among those who have experienced nothing else as among those who have also experienced poverty and failure. There is little romance in wealth to those who have been born wealthy and whose families have been wealthy for generations.
ROBERT WILSON LYND
The Little Angel: A Book of Essays
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
If you do not appreciate what you now have you will never appreciate what you will have.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
To remain secure and prosperous themselves, wealthy nations must extend the kind of cooperation to the less fortunate members that will inspire hope, confidence and progress. A rich nation can for a time, without noticeable damage to itself, pursue a course of self- indulgence, making its single goal the material ease and comfort of its own citizens--thus repudiating its own spiritual and material stake in a peaceful and prosperous society of nations. But the enmities it will incur, the isolation into which it will descend, and the internal moral and physical softness that will be engendered, will, in the long term, bring it to disaster.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
State of the Union Address, January 7, 1960