Quotes About Opulence

At a time when Maecenas, that celebrated arbiter of taste, was busy introducing the heated swimming pool to Rome, the Princeps's house struck those familiar with top-end properties as 'notable neither for scale nor style'.

Robes, dresses, frocks. They hung in endless rows, in hundreds, one beside the other all around the room - gleaming brocade, fluffy clouds of tulle and swansdown, flowery silk, night-black velvet with glittering spangles everywhere like small, many-coloured blinker beacons.

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

Instead of trying to impress other dragons with opulence, they do it with mystery.

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

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

These people seemed so enwrapped in snobbishness and the glory of being rich that they had no art sense whatever.

The hatred of luxury is not an intelligent hatred. It implies a hatred of arts.

Jackass millionaires, hey, hey, Hollywood, here we come.

There's a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There's a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled. —George Lucas, New York Times, 1999

His desktop was a sheet of black opal with neither paper nor a data console to mar its polished perfection. A small printer perched on the outer edge, as if contemplating suicide in remorse at intruding on so august a personage.

The table quite literally groaned under its weight of roasted game

We will have rings and things and fine array

She is rich in beauty.

Dinner began at five and went on until seven forty. It was a meal worthy of the age, the house, and the season. Pea soup to begin, followed by a roast swan with sweet sauce, giblets, mutton steaks, a partridge pie, and four snipe. The second course was a plum pudding with brandy sauce, tarts, mince pies, custards, and cakes, all washed down with port wine and claret and Madeira and home-brewed ale. Ross felt that there was only one thing missing: Charles.

Sounds descriptive of some TV evangelists from the "name it and claim it" crowd. They certainly are "rich and increased with goods . . .")

I have a lot of money.

Sometimes it seemed to Raisa that life at court was designed to keep a person from thinking too much about anything in particular.

And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.

And even sadness was also something for rich people, for people who could afford it, for people who didn't have anything better to do. Sadness was a luxury.

But this is not eternity, it is condemnation. How opulent this silence is. It is the accumulation of centuries. It is the silence of a cockroach looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything experiences the other; in this desert things know things. Things know things as much as this… this something that I shall call pardon, if I wish to save myself within the human plan. It is pardon in itself. Pardon is one of the attributes of living matter.

the people were steeped in the crepuscular gloom of antiquity; and were wise with all manner of accumulated lore; and were subtle in the practice of strange refinements, of erudite perversities, of all that can shroud with artful opulence and grace and variety the bare uncouth cadaver of life, or hide from mortal vision the leering skull of death.

Money attracts money like a magnet. It doesn't trickle down. It is sucked up.

Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops. —COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.):