Quotes about wealth

I sometimes think that there is a link between the decline in humanity and the increase in prosperity and comfort. Property and comfort are what people seek, but the costs to character are often terrifying.

We are not rich in the bank, but we have always prospered, and we have quite enough. I never walk out with my husband but I hear the people bless him. I never go into a house of any degree but I hear his praises or see them in grateful eyes. I never lie down at night but I know that in the course of that day he has alleviated pain and soothed some fellow-creature in the time of need. I know that from the beds of those who were past recovery, thanks have often, often gone up, in the last hour, for his patient ministration. Is not this to be rich?

The poor didn’t have them and so the rich flaunted them, the larger and more conspicuous the better.

“But you can be sure there are pockets of wealth and influence, and I’m willing to wager that a few people are wealthier and more influential than they were before.”

“That’s always the way with disasters,” I said.

“What?”

“They’re never bad news for everyone. Something nasty always rises to the top.”

No doubt his grandmother and his great-grandfather had hoped to empower a senator, enrich a great art collection or encourage a dazzling marriage, but in the end they had mainly subsidized idleness, drunkenness, treachery and divorce.

No man is an island — although one’s known a surprising number who own one.

When a man of my father’s wealth dies of cancer, you know they haven’t found a cure.

Wealth, or large amounts of possessions seemed to him limiting. They brought their own prison with them. He preferred, since he had once known a kind of prison, to travel free.

You don’t like me saying that, but here’s the truth: luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one generally doesn’t have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.

What is wealth? A dream of fools.

for luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness; it sells the country to softness and vanity, and takes away from the State all its citizens, to make them slaves one to another, and one and all to public opinion.

"A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth."