wealth Quotes

“If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it ‘cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he’s poor in hisself, there ain’t no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an’ maybe he’s disappointed that nothin’ he can do ‘ll make him feel rich.”

“Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God some day kind people won’t all be poor.”

“If you’re in trouble or hurt or need–go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help–the only ones.”

“His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it. . . . I am sorry for him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims! Himself, always.”

“This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he said. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!”

“It was, as I have said, a fine autumnal day, the sky was clear and serene, and nature wore that rich and golden livery which we always associate with the idea of abundance.”

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.

“The thing is, it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.”

″‘Aiyah, Nadine, there’s a difference between being grand and being discreet,’ Daisy commented, knowing full well that families like the Leongs and the Youngs guarded their privacy to the point of obsession.”

“On the train the next day, Joe didn’t make many speeches with rhymes to her, but he bought her the best things the butcher had, like apples and a glass lantern full of candies. Mostly he talked about plans for the town when he got there…Janie took a lot of looks at him and she was proud of what she saw. Kind of portly like rich white folks. Strange trains, and people and places didn’t scare him neither. Where they got off the train at Maitland he found a buggy to carry them over to the colored town right away.”

“But how could they know up-to-date folks was spitting in flowery little things like that? It sort of made the rest of them feel that they had been taken advantage of. Like things had been kept from them. Maybe more things in the world besides spitting pots had been hid from them, when they wasn’t told no better than to spit in tomato cans. It was bad enough for white people, but when one of your own color could be so different it put you on a wonder. It was like seeing your sister turn into a ‘gator. A familiar strangeness. You keep seeing your sister in the ‘gator and the ‘gator in your sister and you’d rather not. There was no doubt that the town respected him and even admired him in a way. But any man who walks in the way of power and property is bound to meet hate.”

“She was generous to a fault, and Rachel spent most of her college years being showered with gifts, enjoying glorious meals at culinary destinations like Chez Panisse and Post Ranch Inn, and going on weekend spa trips all along the California coast courtesy of Peik Lin’s handy American Express black card.”

“Remember, this is Asia, and first impressions can be deceiving. You know how most Asians hoard their money. The rich are even more extreme. Many of the wealthiest people here make an effort not to stand out, and most of the time, you would never know you were standing next to a billionaire.”

So distribution should undo excess, And each man have enough.

“Nicky, boys with proper manners do not ever ask questions like that. You do not ever ask people if they are rich or discuss matters concerning money.”

“I shall have to sell our manor, our furniture, the carriage. And I shall have to sell you, in a manner of speaking. You must marry so that we can be rich again.”

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

“Though I was probably the richest kid in school, I was by no means the most popular.”

“Carmen smiled. ‘I am poor, but I am rich. I have my children, I have a garden with roses, and I have my faith and the memories of those who have gone before me. What more is there?‘”

“Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it; for it is not by privileges alone, nor by birth, but by landed property handed down from generation to generation, that an aristocracy is constituted. A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness, but unless those fortunes are territorial there is no aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.”

“It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare; and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it.”

“If I were to inquire what passion is most natural to men who are stimulated and circumscribed by the obscurity of their birth or the mediocrity of their fortune, I could discover none more peculiarly appropriate to their condition than this love of physical prosperity. The passion for physical comforts is essentially a passion of the middle classes: with those classes it grows and spreads, with them it preponderates.”

“They entered a very plain house, for the door was only of silver, and the ceilings were only of gold, but wrought in so elegant a taste as to vie with the richest. The antechamber, indeed, was only encrusted with rubies and emeralds, but the order in which everything was arranged made amends for this great simplicity.”

“My friend, you see how perishable are the riches of this world; there is nothing solid but virtue, and the happiness of seeing Cunegonde once more.”

“For the love of gain would reconcile the weaker to the dominion of the stronger, and the possession of capital enabled the more powerful to reduce the smaller towns to subjection.”

“Money is the tool, my child, not the mason; it can help you make acquaintances but not true friends; and it might buy you a life of leisure but not a life of peace.”

“Act as if! Act as if you’re a wealthy man, rich already, and then you’ll surely become rich. Act as if you have unmatched confidence and then people will surely have confidence in you. Act as if you have unmatched experience and then people will follow your advice. And act as if you are already a tremendous success, and as sure as I stand here today - you will become successful!”

“There’s no nobility in poverty. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and I choose rich every time. At least as a rich man, when I have to face my problems, I can show up in the back of a stretch limousine, wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit and a twenty-thousand-dollar gold watch! And, believe me, arriving in style makes your problems a helluva lot easier to deal with.”

“Look at them; as much money as they make, every last one of them is broke! They spend every dime they have, trying to keep up with my lifestyle. But they can’t, because they don’t make enough. So they end up living paycheck to paycheck on a million bucks a year. It’s hard to imagine, considering how you grew up, but, nevertheless, it is what it is.”

“There was never anything hanging from the rafters in his uncle’s crumbling old house. But in his own there was even a leg of pork which he had bought from his neighbor Ching when he killed his pig that looked as though it were sickening for a disease […] In the midst of all this plenty they sat in the house, therefore, when the winds of winter came out of the desert to the northeast of them, winds bitter and biting. ”

“A very few days of practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was also a land of high prices, and that in it the poor man was almost as poor as in any other corner of the earth; and so there vanished in a night all the wonderful dreams of wealth that had been haunting Jurgis. What had made the discovery all the more painful was that they were spending, at American prices, money which they had earned at home rates of wages – and so were really being cheated by the world! The last two days they had all but starved themselves – it made them quite sick to pay the prices that the railroad people asked them for food.”

“If I have a handful of silver it is because I work and my wife works, and we do not, as some do, sit idling over a gambling table or gossiping on doorsteps never swept, letting the fields grow to weeds and our children go half-fed!”

“They much more admire and detest the folly of those who, when they see a rich man, though they neither owe him anything, nor are in any sort dependent on his bounty, yet, merely because he is rich, give him little less than divine honours, even though they know him to be so covetous and base-minded that, notwithstanding all his wealth, he will not part with one farthing of it to them as long as he lives!”

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

“Ulbrickson knew full well that money more or less grew on the trees at Yale, and that funds had been vastly easier to come by in 1928, before the Depression, than in 1936.”

“The single most powerful asset we all have is our mind. If it is trained well, it can create enormous wealth.”

“I am concerned that too many people are focused too much on money and not on their greatest wealth, which is their education.”

“Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. ”

“As I went downstairs I heard Bill singing, ‘Irony and Pity. When you’re feeling . . . Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity.‘”

“This hotel – the Amazon – was for women only, and they were mostly girls my age with wealthy parents [...] and they were all going to posh secretarial schools like Katy Gibbs, where they had to wear hats and stockings and gloves to class, or they had just graduated from places like Katy Gibbs and were secretaries to executives and junior executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.”

“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”

“A gold mine like Vegas breeds its own army, like any other gold mine. Hired muscle tends to accumulate in fast layers around money/power poles … and big money, in Vegas, is synonymous with the Power to protect it.”

“People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.”

“People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they are ruined by wealth as well because they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum.”

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.

“My family has property and I don’t know why I’m being treated like this.”

“Gold clingeth to the protection of the cautious owner who invests it under the advice of men wise in its handling.”

“Gold cometh gladly and in increasing quantity to any man who will put no less than one-tenth of his earnings to create an estate for his future and that of his family.”

“I found the road to wealth when I decided that a part of all I earned was mine to keep.”

“Wealth, like a tree, grows from a tiny seed. The first copper you save is the seed from which your tree of wealth shall grow. The sooner you plant that seed the sooner shall the tree grow. And the more faithfully you nourish and water that tree with consistent savings, the sooner may you bask in contentment beneath its shade.”

“Why are you not smarter? It’s only the rich who can’t afford to be smart. They’re compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me.”

“He told me, I might judge of the Happiness of this State, by the one thing, viz. That this was the State of Life which all other People envied, that Kings have frequently lamented the miserable Consequence of being born to great things, and wish’d they had been placed in the Middle of the two Extremes, between the Mean and the Great; that the wise Man gave his Testimony to this as the just Standard of true Felicity, when he prayed to have neither Poverty or Riches.”

“Bustopher Jones is not skin and bones — In fact, he’s remarkably fat. He doesn’t haunt pubs — he has eight or nine clubs, For he’s the St. James’s Street Cat!”

“That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.”

“Mameh’s sisters were more about money than anything else, and any hurts that popped up along the way, they just swept them under the rug. They were all trying hard to be American, you know, not knowing what to keep and what to leave behind.”

“All this, whatsoever exists in the universe, should be covered by the Lord. Having renounced (the unreal), enjoy (the Real). Do not covet the wealth of any man.”

“Earning success is hard. The process is laborious, tedious, sometimes even boring. Becoming wealthy, influential, and world-class in your field is slow and arduous.””

“Radical obedience to Christ is not easy... It’s not comfort, not health, not wealth, and not prosperity in this world.”

“Radical obedience to Christ is not easy... It’s not comfort, not health, not wealth, and not prosperity in this world.”

“That was what Curt had given her, this gift of contentment, of ease. ”

“Now, it is very important that you conduct yourself in a manner befitting to your station while at Spence. It’s fine to be kind to the lesser girls, but remember that they are not your equals.”

“In all our Nation’s striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay?”

“But if that just assuages guilt, it’s just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, ‘We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well.”

“In other words, wabi-sabi tells us to stop our preoccupation with success--wealth, status, power, and luxury--and enjoy the unencumbered life.”

“Well, there’s one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.”

“In the pearl he saw Coyotito sitting at a little desk in a school, just as Kino had once seen it through an open door. And Coyotito was dressed in a jacket, and he had on a white collar and a broad silken tie

“Visibility is a trap.”

“Every man will manage his own wealth till his fated death-day, but there is a time when each one of us leaves here for Hel.”

″‘Son, if you want to, one day you could make a million dollars.‘”

“Wealth can also be that attitude of gratitude with which we remind ourselves everyday to count our blessings.”

“Wealth and place breed insolence that brings ruin in its train.”

“Juan follows her, determined to take her money, for he believes that the money will make him happy.”

“It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased...”

“This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.”

“What I enjoy most…is living like an aristocrat without the burden of having to be one. Blue bloods are so inbred and weak. All those generations of importance and grandeur to live up to. No wonder they lack ambition. I don’t envy them.”

“He wished he could go back in time to the turning point, the moment inside the treasury when he was smitten with envy of the King’s wealth. If history could be unwound and he were there again, he would consider the consequences and he wouldn’t steal.”

“it matters less how much more you make than what you do with what you already have.”

“Many people who live in expensive homes and drive luxury cars do not actually have much wealth. Then, we discovered something even odder: Many people who have a great deal of wealth do not even live in upscale neighborhoods.”

“Have you ever noticed those people whom you see jogging day after day? They are the ones who seem not to need to jog. But that’s why they are fit. Those who are wealthy work at staying financially fit. But those who are not financially fit do little to change their status.”

“Most people will never become wealthy in one generation if they are married to people who are wasteful. A couple cannot accumulate wealth if one of its members is a hyperconsumer.”

“It’s easier to accumulate wealth if you don’t live in a high-status neighborhood.”

“If you’re not yet wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice your household’s total annual realized income.”

“Multiply your age times your realized pretax annual household income from all sources except inheritances. Divide by ten. This, less any inherited wealth, is what your net worth should be.”

“Wealth, my son, should never be your goal in life. Your words are eloquent, but they are mere words. True wealth is of the heart, not of the purse.”

“To become a master in the art of sales one must learn and practice the secret of each scroll. When one masters these principles one has the power to accumulate all the wealth he desires.”

“That baby came complete. Their value was innate from their first breath. Their value did not depend on external things like wealth or appearance or politics or popularity. It was the infinite value of human life.”

“In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words: industry and frugality. Waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. He that gets all he can honestly, and saves all he can, will certainly become rich.”

“She would go as a single woman who must work for her living. Her best chance, she had decided, lay in seeking employment as a governess in one of the wealthy families. She liked teaching children, and hopefully there might be a library where she could extend her own learning as well as that of her charges. Whatever befell, there would be a blue sky overhead, and the warmth and color and fragrance and beauty that her heart craved.”

“Dauntless Little John was a wealthy youth indeed with all those gold pieces, and he lived happily in his palace. Then one day what should he do but look behind him and see his shadow: he was so frightened he died.”

“Supposed we have fine weather, fine crops, all the stock in good shape. Now that’s wealth. Real wealth. But what’s the result? Counted in dollars, we’re poor. Sometimes the best crops make a man the poorest.”

“All that great wealth came to my hands, and if I do not say how great it was, ‘tis that I may not wake envy, for it was far more than I could have thought.”

“It examines how possessions and wealth affect self-image and esteem, why some people become misers and others gamblers, spendthrifts and tycoons, and why some people gain more pleasure from giving away money than from retaining it.”

“Jean-Baptiste “JB” Marion, a quick-witted painter who wants to make a name in the art world. The book follows their relationships changing under the influence of success, wealth, addiction, and pride.”

“Deep into her thirties, Emira would wrestle with what to take from her time at the Chamberlain house. Some days she carried the sweet relief that Briar would learn to become a self-sufficient person. And some days, Emira would carry the dread that if Briar ever struggled to find herself, she’d probably just hire someone to do it for her.”

Jimmy, too, looked very well when he was dressed and, as he stood in the hall giving a last equation to the bows of his dress tie, his father may have felt even commercially satisfied at having secured for his son qualities often unpurchaseable.

“I have forgiven the world for the love of you; now that I see you, young and with a promising future,—now that I think of all that may result to you in the good fortune of such a disclosure, I shudder at any delay, and tremble lest I should not assure to one as worthy as yourself the possession of so vast an amount of hidden wealth.”

“I was then almost assured that the inheritance had neither profited the Borgias nor the family, but had remained unpossessed like the treasures of the Arabian Nights, which slept in the bosom of the earth under the eyes of the genie.”

“Happy? Who can answer for that? Happiness or unhappiness is the secret known but to one’s self and the walls—walls have ears but no tongue; but if a large fortune produces happiness, Danglars is happy.”

Thomson & French, the Roman bankers, have sent to me a certain person calling himself the Count of Monte Cristo, and have given him an unlimited credit with me. I confess this is the drollest thing I have ever met with in the course of my extensive foreign transactions, and you may readily suppose it has greatly roused my curiosity. I took the trouble this morning to call on the pretended count—if he were a real count he wouldn’t be so rich. But, would you believe it, ‘He was not receiving.’ So the master of Monte Cristo gives himself airs befitting a great millionaire or a capricious beauty.

“Luxury has everything.”

“I have often thought with a bitter joy that these riches, which would make the wealth of a dozen families, will be forever lost to those men who persecute me. This idea was one of vengeance to me, and I tasted it slowly in the night of my dungeon and the despair of my captivity. But now I have forgiven the world for the love of you; now that I see you, young and with a promising future,—now that I think of all that may result to you in the good fortune of such a disclosure, I shudder at any delay, and tremble lest I should not assure to one as worthy as yourself the possession of so vast an amount of hidden wealth.”

“You are most kind; but as regards myself, I can find no merit I possess, save that, as a millionaire, I might have become a partner in the speculations of M. Aguado and M. Rothschild; but as my motive in travelling to your capital would not have been for the pleasure of dabbling in stocks, I stayed away till some favorable chance should present itself of carrying my wish into execution.”

We have our clothes, some more splendid than others,—this is our credit; but when a man dies he has only his skin; in the same way, on retiring from business, you have nothing but your real principal of about five or six millions, at the most; for third-rate fortunes are never more than a fourth of what they appear to be, like the locomotive on a railway, the size of which is magnified by the smoke and steam surrounding it.

“I wished, from curiosity, to take these, that I might be able to say that without any advice or preparation the house of Danglars had paid me five millions without a minute’s delay; it would have been remarkable.”

“He, the sovereign lord and master of a world which grinds the bodies and souls of human beings into dollars—

“This is a bank-note,” said I, “for five hundred pounds.” “That is a bank-note,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, “for five hundred pounds. And a very handsome sum of money too, I think. You consider it so?” “How could I do otherwise!” “Ah! But answer the question,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Undoubtedly.” “You consider it, undoubtedly, a handsome sum of money. Now, that handsome sum of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on this day, in earnest of your expectations. ”

“I mustn’t see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets; there mustn’t be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must have horses, Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood ‘uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? No, no. We’ll show ‘em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won’t us?”

“You can always get money from her. She is as rich as a Jew, she can give you five thousand roubles at a time and she is not above taking a pledge for a rouble. Lots of our fellows have had dealings with her. But she is an awful old harpy....”