Quotes about wealth

Wealth is commonplace, but wisdom is rare.

Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity,

Which join'd with Time and Industry,

Had carry'd Life's Conveniences,

It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,

To such a Height, the very Poor

Liv'd better than the Rich before.

Most rich people get rich by taking what they want without paying for it. It’s the way of the world.

The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor—they never overlap, do they?See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of?Losing weight and looking like the poor.

With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open—a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road—and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.

Charity is the opium of the privileged,

A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this.

Convinced that character is all and circumstances nothing, [the Puritan] sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion … but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.

At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.

Those who can create wealth — and know that they can — are able to dictate their own terms. Wealth is a means to happiness, but it is not the main one. What most people want is control over their lives. They want the ability to choose how they live: what work they do, the way they interact with friends and colleagues, the quality of their personal relationships, the way they view themselves.

We can do without any article of luxury we have never had; but when once obtained, it is not 'in human natur' to surrender it voluntarily.

To despise riches may, indeed, be philosophic; but to dispense them worthily must, surely, be more beneficial to mankind.