Quotes About Wealth

Very few men acquire wealth in such a manner as to receive pleasure from it. Just as long as there is the enthusiasm of the chase they enjoy it; but when they begin to look around, and think of settling down, they find that that part by which joy enters is dead in them. They have spent their lives in heaping up colossal piles of treasure, which stand, at the end, like the pyramids in the desert sands, holding only the dust of kings.

A man can no more make money suddenly and largely, and be unharmed by it, than one could suddenly grow from a child's stature to a man's without harm.

Wealth in activity--capital with all its friction--is far safer than invested wealth lying dead.

Money in the hands of one or two men is like a dungheap in a barnyard. So long as it lies in a mass, it does no good; but, if it is only spread out evenly on the land, everything will grow.

If any man is rich and powerful, he comes under that law of God by which the higher branches must take the burnings of the sun, and shade those that are lower; by which the tall trees must protect the weak plants beneath them.

Poverty is never by the grace of God in the estimation of a New-Englander. It comes to him by post from the other direction.

The two poorest men in the world are buckled together at the opposite sides of the circle. The man who has so much money that he does not know what to do with it and the man who has no money at all touch each other, as you will find; and one is about as poor as the other.

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.

What is't to be adorn'd and shine with Gold, Drest like a God, but never know the Pleasure?

I knew what it was like to be poor, and that once you had become rich, anything was better than being poor again.

Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis - he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land. Since the principle of any rich person who wants to stay rich is, never give anything away unless you absolutely have to, the land has stayed with Crown ever since.

Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had been lucky enough to be born rich. He wasn't in the mad oligarch class but once you're past a certain point, the sheer weight of your money sucks in wealth like a financial singularity. If you're sensible enough not to blow it on race horses, cocaine or musical theatre, then it becomes a perpetual-motion money making machine.

We traced a payment from one Antem Sergeyevich Yershov, a mid-tier oligarch,' said Silver. Mid-tier meaning that he was merely obscenely wealthy, rather than functionally an independent nation state in his own right.

Obviously the city had been feeling its oats at the end of the eighteenth century and, between all those displaced agricultural workers in the mills and the slaves on the plantations in the Caribbean, it had money to burn.

Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis —he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land.

This particular citadel of the mighty was reached by a glass sided lift which ran up a completely transparent service core that allowed one—and one assumes that here one refers to one as one—to appreciate the view over Hyde Park which, after all, is what one has paid upward of ten million to enjoy.

In home furnishing terms, past a certain point, more money doesn't get you anything except an increase in insurance premiums. An

Gallant gestures come easy when your purse is filled with gold.

I find the fact that billionaires are quoted as if the fact that they are billionaires gives them some kind of wisdom is outrageous.

Dread of returning to Iraq equals the direst poverty, and that's how he feels right now, poor , like a shabby homeless kid suddenly thrust into the company of millionaires. Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars. This is what he truly envies of these people, the luxury of terror as a talking point, and at this moment he feels so sorry for himself that he could break right down and cry.

Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars.

The purpose of money was to purchase one's freedom to pursue that which is useful and interesting.

I know that man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor one for the alms of my guilt.

the more thoroughly I liberate myself from prevailing cultural assumptions—around education, wealth, ambition, and success, to name but a few—the more choice I actually have. The more freedom I have.