Quotes About Opulence

Her palace shimered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue.

The woman who had been born in an imperial palace, and then, as Queen of France, had had hundreds of rooms in her dwelling house, was now imprisoned in a tiny basement cell, its walls streaming with damp, and its grated window half occluded.

The rich kept you waiting so that you could feel free to admire all that they had.

All around them the cacophony of greed carried on in its most glorious and extreme excess.

We spared no expense.

Three flutes of champagne in the early afternoon anchored by the weight of nine oysters.

In order that a select few might live in great opulence, millions of people work hard for an entire lifetime, never free from financial insecurity, and at great cost to the quality of their lives. The complaint is not that the very rich have so much more than everyone else but that their superabundance and endless accumulation comes at the expense of everyone and everything else, including our communities and our environment.

Bacon loved the extremes of waking in the grim discomfort of his living quarters and working in the studio's cramped chaos before appearing for dinner, impeccably groomed, in the hushed opulence of a grand hotel.

His life was a mystery to her, fabulously rich when he chose to embellish it, but otherwise a blank.

Isn't it strange how wealth is always wasted on the rich?

Not every visitor was enchanted. William Morris, the future designer and aesthete, then aged seventeen, was so appalled by what he saw as the exhibition's lack of taste and veneration of excess that he staggered from the building and was sick in the bushes.

Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.

Happiness is being famous for your financial ability to indulge in every kind of excess.

I mean to say that there was, in fact, something unhealthy in the life of well-to-do people. No end of superfluity. Superfluous furniture and superfluous rooms in the houses, superfluous refinement of feelings, superfluous expressions.

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti Montrachet.

Vin de Constance

What would Entertainment Tonight say if they knew you were doing it on your office floor when you have twenty bedrooms? Slowly he pushed forward, entering her. They would say, 'That lucky Addison bloke,' he breathed, 'having sex with the beautiful, gorgeous, funny, brilliant, multi-talented Samantha Jellicoe.

Whoa!" Shawna paused on the sidewalk outside her Brooklyn apartment complex and gaped at the limousine idling in the street. "You went all out.

Physical glamour she admired, and an open purse likewise.

Martin eyed the buffet table because he'd slept through dinner and was ravenous; but as luck would have it, who was standing next to the tower of cream cakes but Evelyn- looking equally delicious in a stunning, pale yellow gown of light diaphanous fabric that seemed to flutter around her legs on a nonexistent breeze. And her bosom... Well, she looked delectable with pearls crisscrossing over her lush, alluring breasts.

BY THE 1890s the Astor estate, comprising the assets of both cousins, was worth about $200 million. In the 1930s the historian Burton J. Hendrick called it "the world's greatest monument to unearned increment…a first mortgage on Fate itself.

For even though the rest of the city--no, the rest of the country--starved and searched fruitlessly for work and slept in a humpy in the park, society's finest could still squander their money however they saw fit. The unemployed, they would say, were lazy. If they worked harder, they'd do as well as Mr. Harry Moneypants was doing, who'd earned his vast fortune by having the foresightedness of selecting rich parents, who had, in their time, also cleverly selected rich parents.

Luxury is more deadly than any foe.

Luxury cannot afford to intimidate.