Quotes About Wealth

All that is most valuable can be had for nothing. They come as presents from the hand of the Creator, and neither air nor sky, nor beauty, genius, health, or strength, can be bought or sold.

We cannot, when the nation becomes fully civilized and very rich, continue to be civilized and rich unless the nation shows more foresight than we are showing at this moment.

Unless wealth was chastened by culture or regulated by government, it was at worst predatory, at best boring.

the most dangerous members of the criminal class—the criminals of great wealth.

They that haue much, feare much to loose thereby, And store of cares doth follow riches store.

It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happie, rich or poore: For some, that hath abundance at his will, Hath not enough, but wants in greatest store

Death in Venice made me hope that there might be others like me, somewhere out there, possibly in the ritzy nearby community of Charlevoix. He'd be older, rich, devoted to me and my magical youth.

On Fire Island everyone was in a Speedo pulling a wagon of groceries across the bumpy boardwalk; you couldn't tell the houseboys from the bankers.

Rusheen was theirs, the old faithful trees keeping watch and enough head of cattle to defray expenses for at least six months or so to come.

Everything hinged on money

As Bastiat understood, a very low rate of interest may benefit the rich, who have access to credit, more than the poor.

Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.

The prospect of gain will urge a rich and gouty senator as far as Spoleto; every sentiment of arrogance and dignity is subdued by the hopes of an inheritance, or even of a legacy; and a wealthy childless citizen is the most powerful of the Romans.

He commanded a painter to reverse the figures and the attitudes; and the emperors were delineated on the same canvas, approaching in a suppliant posture to empty their bags of tributary gold

I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: My vow of poverty has given me an hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince. — I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.

Washington had dreamed of Potomac River navigation long before independence made it a patriotic cause. Not only could such a waterway improve access to his frontier holdings, it would channel western trade through the mouth of the Potomac near his Mount Vernon plantation. Both would increase his wealth.

eating dog food at the foot of the rich man's table.

It was hard to believe that in a society of computer chips, banana chips, and anti-lock brakes, of sitcoms, Home Shopping Clubs, and pay-per-view, and of surround-sound stereos and microwave ovens—it was hard to believe that such destitution could exist at all, much less under the very nose of the same society… He'd

Don't you know there's another bubble as well? An expectations bubble. Bigger houses, private planes, yachts... stupid salaries and bonuses. People come to desire these things and expect them. But the expectations bubble will burst as well, as all bubbles do.

but he'd managed to get his hands on a big estate

a messuage, a dovecote, a carucate of arable and ten acres of meadow.

A Wall Street man is greedy, too. No harm in that. Without greed, I always say, there'd be no civilization. But the Wall Street man doesn't have the patience to till the soil or manufacture things. He's clever, but he's not deep. He invests in companies, but he doesn't much care what they are, or what they do. What he wants is to bet on them. Wall Street will always be full of young men, betting.

Most people wait for their parents to die with a mixture of tremendous sadness and plans for a new swimming pool.

Capital erosion was another way to waste his substance, to become as thin and hollow as he felt, to lighten the burden of undeserved good fortune, and commit a symbolic suicide while he still dithered about the real one. He also nursed the opposite fantasy that when he became penniless he would discover some incandescent purpose born of his need to make money.