Quotes About Wealth

The Superclass tries to promote its values. Ordinary people complain of divine injustice, they envy power, and it pains them to see others having fun. They don't understand that no one is having fun, that everyone is worried and insecure, and that what the jewels, cars, and fat wallets conceal is a huge inferiority complex.

Our contradictions. We are in such a hurry to grow up, and then we long for our lost childhood. We make ourselves ill earning money, and then spend all our money on getting well again. We think so much about the future that we neglect the present, and thus experience neither the present nor the future. We live as if we were never going to die, and die as if we had never lived.

The boy knew that in money there was magic; whoever has money is never really alone.

I savour the idea of my new state: single and a millionaire.

They are so very cultivated, so very rich and so utterly charming. At the end of each day, they all ask themselves: 'Is it time I stopped?' And they all reply: 'If I did, there would be no meaning to my life.' As if they actually knew what the meaning of life was.

Where your treasure is, there also will be your heart, the alchemist had told him.

Some of my friends are very poor, the only thing they have is money.

tremendous profits

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

It is not poverty that is to be heared, but the lack of balance between riches and poverty.

And listening to all the things they would do if they had these things, Wang Lung heard only of how much they would eat and sleep, and of what dainties they would eat that they had never tasted,and how they would gamble in this great tea shop and in that, and what pretty women they would buy for their lust, and above all, how none would ever work again, even as they rich man behind the wall never worked.

He lived in the rich city as alien as a rat in a rich man's house that is fed on scraps thrown away, and hides here and there and is never a part of the real life of the house.

The narrator refers to a character as an oily scoundrel whose hands were heavy with the money that stuck to them.

thing and it could be sold for a heap of silver and sometimes

Yuan could not for his life say, "This man is rich and evil, and this man is poor and good," and so he was spoiled for any cause-making, however great the cause.

Day by day beneath the opulence of this city Wang Lung lived in the foundations of poverty upon which it was laid.

There's a richness to all of the smelly stuff that we so dislike and so little desire. The delightful things—what we love so dearly about ourselves, the places in which we feel some sense of pride or inspiration—these also are our wealth.

When the anger of the gods is incurred, wealth or power only bring more devastating punishment.

The rich believe that their money will insulate them from setbacks and frustrations, and that's one of the absurdist expectations of all.

This argument has been codified in the twentieth century as meritocracy, in which those on top in the process of capitalist accumulation have merited their position.

Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

Art was not created as a way to riches. Strive to become a true artist; all else will take care of itself.

When you go to an art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.