491 Wealth Quotes

Those who thank God much are the truly wealthy. So our inner happiness depends not on what we experience but on the degree of our gratitude to God, whatever the experience.

These decrees of yours are no different from spiders' webs. They'll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they'll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.

It would seem that the full meaning of the word marriage can never be known by those who, at their first outspring into life, are surrounded by all that money can give. It requires the single sitting-room, the single fire, the necessary little efforts of self-devotion, the inward declaration that some struggle shall be made for that other one.

Every man worships the dollar, and is down before his shrine from morning to night... Other men, the world over, worship regularly at the shrine with matins and vespers, nones and complines, and whatever other daily services may be known to the religious houses; but the New Yorker is always on his knees.

Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.

Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

Money is a strange business. People who haven't got it aim it strongly. People who have are full of troubles.

Wealthy men can't live in an island that is encircled by poverty. We all breathe the same air. We must give a chance to everyone, at least a basic chance.

I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year.

You ride in a limousine the first time, it's a big thrill but after that it's just a stupid car.

Experience has shown that the trade of the East is the key to national wealth and influence.

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.

In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.

When you come to analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for ability and success.

No radiant pearl which crested Fortune wears, No gem that twinkling hangs from Beauty's ears, Not the bright stars which Night's blue arch adorn, Nor rising suns that gild the vernal morn, Shine with such lustre as the tear that flows Down Virtue's manly cheek for others' woes.

Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.

The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

Isn't Hollywood a dump-in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.

Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.

The Spanish voyager, as his caravel ploughed the adjacent seas, might give full scope to his imagination, and dream that beyond the long, low margin of forest which bounded his horizon lay hid a rich harvest for some future conqueror; perhaps a second Mexico with its royal palace and sacred pyramids, or another Cuzco with its temple of the Sun, encircled with a frieze of gold. Haunted by such visions, the ocean chivalry of Spain could not long stand idle.

They [the Reagan Administration] want to put street criminals in jail to make life safer for the business criminals. They're against street crime, providing that street isn't Wall Street.

Conservatives say if you don't give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they've lost all incentive because we've given them too much money.

The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

I'm not doing my philanthropic work, out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I'm doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

Money in doses disproportionate to our needs enslaves.

I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.

Money without brains is always dangerous.

The successful sale of British Telecom...reveals a vast and untapped yearning among ordinary people for a direct stake in the ownership of British enterprise. Investment in shares has begun to take its place, with ownership of a home and either a bank or building society deposit, as a way for ordinary people to participate in enterprise and wealth creation. We are seeing the birth of people's capitalism.

Broadway - the great sluice that washes out the dust of the gold-mines of Gotham.

Where wealth and freedom reign contentment fails, And honor sinks where commerce long prevails.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay; Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

His best companions, innocence and health; And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.

A man he was to all the country dear, And passing rich with forty pounds a year.

No gentleman ever has any money.

Even you are not rich enough, Sir Robert, to buy back your past. No man is.

I am the rich man's guru.

'You will agree with me that he is not everybody's money.'

Oh Patimkin! Fruit grew in their refrigerator and sporting goods dropped from their trees!

They say that it is better to be poor and happy than rich and miserable, but how about a compromise, like moderately rich and just moody?

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

Affluence separates people. Poverty knits 'em together. You got some sugar and I don't; I borrow some of yours. Next month you might not have any flour; well, I'll give you some of mine.

'They say money don't stink,' he said. 'I sometimes wonder.'

Money is the root of all jewelry.

Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.

$100 placed at 7 percent interest compounded quarterly for 200 years will increase to more than $100,000,000 - by which time it will be worth nothing.

People who go broke in a big way never miss any meals. It is the poor jerk who is shy a half slug who must tighten his belt.

Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them.

I despise a stingy man. I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty million of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it.

It is not necessary to be great to be happy; it is not necessary to be rich to be just and generous and to have a heart filled with divine affection.

The meanest hut with love in it is a palace fit for the gods, and a palace without love is a den only fit for wild beasts. That is my doctrine! You cannot be so poor that you cannot help somebody. Good nature is the cheapest commodity in the world; and love is the only thing that will pay ten percent to borrower and lender both.

Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!

'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead? She 'as ships on the foam - she 'as millions at 'ome, An' she pays us poor beggars in red.

Early in life, most of us probably observe an unhappy relationship between labor and wealth - to wit, the heavier the labor, the less the wealth. The man doing heavy manual work makes less than the man who makes a machine work for him, and this man makes less than the man sitting at a desk. The really rich people, the kind who go around on yachts and collect old books and new wives, do no labor at all. The economic reasons for dividing the money this way are clear enough. One, it has always been done that way; and two, it's too hard to change at this late date. But the puzzling question is why, since the money is parceled out on this principle, young people are constantly being pummeled to take up a life of labor. In any sensible world, the young would be told they could labor if they wanted to, but warned that if they did so it would cost them.

O! what a Godlike Power is that of doing Good! - I envy the Rich and the Great for nothing else!

The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.

'I don't care if you're worth one billion dollars (WHAT!?), two billion dollars (WHAT!?), three billion dollars (WHAT!?), four billion dollars (WHAT!?), five billion dollars (WHAT!?), six billion dollars (WHAT!?), seven billion dollars (WHAT!?), eight billion dollars (WHAT!?); if you piss me off, I will proceed to open up an eight-billion-dollar can of whoop ass on ya, and that's all I got to say about that!' (To Donald Trump)

They got how many trillions of dollars in gold and silver and jewelry and art and real estate and stained glass and they're passing the basket on Sunday so they can get the tomato farmers' donation?

But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

Fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman; if she be too much wooed, she is the farther off.

Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to. A degree of friendship called slight when its object is poor or obscure, and intimate when he is rich or famous

Gee Moss, imagine what God could do if he had your money

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery. Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Ron Paul: What's happening is, there's transfer of wealth from the poor and the middle class to the wealthy. This comes about because of the monetary system that we have. When you inflate a currency or destroy a currency, the middle class gets wiped out. So the people who get to use the money first which is created by the Federal Reserve system benefit. So the money gravitates to the banks and to Wall Street. That's why you have more billionaires than ever before. Today, this country is in the middle of a recession for a lot of people... As long as we live beyond our means we are destined to live beneath our means. And we have lived beyond our means because we are financing a foreign policy that is so extravagant and beyond what we can control, as well as the spending here at home. And we're depending on the creation of money out of thin air, which is nothing more than debasement of the currency. It's counterfeit... So, if you want a healthy economy, you have to study monetary theory and figure out why it is that we're suffering. And everybody doesn't suffer equally, or this wouldn't be so bad. It's always the poor people -- those who are on retired incomes -- that suffer the most. But the politicians and those who get to use the money first, like the military industrial complex, they make a lot of money and they benefit from it. John McCain: Everybody is paying taxes and wealth creates wealth. And the fact is that I would commend to your reading, Ron, 'Wealth of Nations,' because that's what this is all about. A vibrant economy creates wealth. People pay taxes. Revenues are at an all time high.

The landed men are the true owners of our political vessel, the moneyed men are no more than passengers in it

Peel me a grape.

Think and grow rich.