Quotes, aphorisms and phrases about wealth and being wealthy, or about being able to count on a wide availability of material goods and money, reflections, advantages and disadvantages.
Quotes about wealth
- Wealth is a good servant but the worst of lovers. (Francis Bacon)
- I have everything, and yet I have nothing, and although I have nothing, I am still in need of nothing. (Terence)
- I dream of a world where nobody is rich enough to buy someone and nobody is poor enough to sell. (Solon)
- There is no merit in abundance or blame in poverty. (Apuleius)
- If we command our wealth, we will be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we will only be poor. (Edmund Burke)
- Man is born rich in everything, growing impoverished, and having reached old age he finds himself almost without anything. But since nothing is truly possessed, so nothing can be lost. (Giacomo Leopardi)
- Every day is a bank account, and time is its currency. Nobody is rich, nobody is poor, we have 24 hours each. (Christopher Rice)
- It is as difficult for the rich to acquire wisdom as it is for the wise to acquire wealth. (Epictetus)
- A coin can hide the bigger star if you keep it too close to the eye. (Samuel Grafton)
- That of being poor and wanting to live rich is a widespread vice. (Tenth Juvenile Junius)
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- It is very difficult to say what happiness brings. Poverty and wealth have both failed. (Kin Hubbard)
- The unjust passion for wealth is wicked; with justice it is ugly; excessive avarice, when not even contrary to justice, is still sordid. (Epicurus)
- Wealth, any income that is at least a hundred dollars more per year than your husband's sister's husband's income. (HL Mencken)
- With wealth, worries grow. (Homer)
- There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of happiness from the idea of wealth; it is the beginning of wisdom. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
- He who uses clay pots as if they were silver is great, but he who uses silver pots as if they were clay is no less. A weak soul cannot bear wealth. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- The rich man's belief that the poor man is happy is no longer absurd than the poor man's belief that the rich man is happy. (Laurence Johnston Peter)
- Fortunata is the house that does not owe its riches to injustice, which it conserves wisely and which it spends without having to regret it. (Solon)
- The real measure of your wealth is given by how much your value would be if you lost all your money. (Bernard Meltzer)
- The satisfactions of wealth do not lie in simple possession or insane expenses, but in using it wisely. (Miguel De Cervantes)
- Wealth. The savings of many in the hands of one. (Ambrose Bierce)
- The poor go to war, to fight and die for the whims, wealth and surplus of others. (Plutarch)
- It is not a shame to get rich. But it is a shame to die rich. (Andrew Carnegie)
- The ambitious must always fight against his time with the weapons of the time. In our era there is a cult of wealth and our god is gold. In order to succeed, wealth is needed, so at any cost you must be rich. (Oscar Wilde)
- A great fortune is a great slavery. (Seneca)
- Not because you own many goods you will have the right to call yourself happy: more rightly the name of happy is he who knows how to make wise use of the gifts of God and face cruel poverty, and who fears dishonor more than death. (Horace)
- Let me laugh with the wise and eat with the rich. (Samuel Johnson)
- The wealth required by nature is limited and easy to acquire, that of vain opinions extends to infinity. (Epicurus)
- The value of a man is measured by the few things he creates, not by the many goods he accumulates. (Kahlil Gibran)
- Health surpasses all other external goods, to such an extent that a healthy beggar is happier than a sick king. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
- It is as difficult for the rich to acquire wisdom as it is for the wise to acquire wealth. (Epictetus)
- It is the mind that makes us healthy or sick, that makes us sad or happy, rich or poor. (Edmund Spenser)
- I am rich in men's poverty and poor in men's wealth. (Abdelmajid Benjelloun)
- Rich is someone who collects more than he spends; poor is the one whose exits go beyond entering. (Jean De La Bruyere)
- I am grateful for the wealth I had, but my way of being has not changed. My feet are still on the ground. I'm just wearing better shoes. (Oprah Winfrey)
- Virtue does not come from wealth, but rather from virtue every wealth and every good derives, for the individual as well as for the states. (Socrates)
- There is a particular pleasure in the courage that knows how to place itself above wealth. To despise money is actually to dethrone a king. There is a nice taste. (Nicolas de Chamfort)
- Many wicked men are rich, and good ones poor, but we will not exchange our superiority for wealth with them. (Solon)
- Wealth does not consist in having great wealth, but in having few needs. (Epictetus)
- The more the money increases, the more the desire grows. (Tenth Juvenile Junius)
- God shows his contempt for wealth with the type of people he chooses to receive it. (Alexander Pope)
- Riches are at the service of the wise, while they command the fool. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
Aphorisms on wealth
- When you have no money, you always think about it. When they have it, too. (Jean Paul Getty)
- When the rich consume for their personal ends the surplus necessary for the subsistence of the poor, they rob them. (St. Thomas Aquinas)
- The greatest wealth is in being enough for yourself. (Epicurus)
- It is not worth owning a thing without enjoying it. (Aesop)
- It is the disgrace of being rich to have to live with rich people. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
- Riches, glory, power are nothing but smoke and vanity. (Henryk Zienkiewicz)
- Wealth must be valued more than all those things that it can give and less than those things that it cannot give. (Ugo Foscolo)
- Wealth resembles seawater: the more you drink it, the more thirsty you are. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
- The hope of getting rich is one of the most common causes of poverty. (Tacit)
- Rich is not he who possesses, but he who gives, he who is capable of giving. (Pope John Paul II)
- The man with a toothache thinks anyone with healthy teeth is happy. The poor man makes the same mistake towards the rich man. (George Bernard Shaw)
- What does true wealth, true happiness consist of? In having few needs. (Luigi Pirandello)
- Those who use clay pottery as if they were silver are great, but those who use silver as if they were clay are no less; only the weak are unable to bear wealth. (Seneca)
- Greed, for those who live in the midst of wealth, is organized poverty. (Publilio Siro)
- You go light if you have nothing; but wealth is a lighter weight. (Wolfang Goethe)
- We see many who are fighting against adversity who are happy, and many though they abound in wealth, who are desperate. (Publius Cornelius Tacitus)
- Living in poverty without any resentment, that's what's difficult; in comparison, being rich without arrogance costs nothing. (Confucius)
- No man is rich enough to buy back the past. (Oscar Wilde)
- The jokes of a rich man always make people laugh. (T.E. Brown)
- It is the heart that makes a man rich. He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has. (Henry Ward Beecher)
- Wealth without virtue is a dangerous neighbor. (Sappho)
- Receive well-being and prosperity without arrogance; and be ready to let them go. (Marco Aurelio)
- I'm a millionaire. This is my religion. (George Bernard Shaw)
- Wealth is the awareness of abundance. (Swami Kriyananda)
- The use of wealth is better than their possession. (Fernando de Rojas)
- If diseases and sufferings do not distinguish between rich and poor, why should we do it? (Sathya Sai Baba)
- "Rich no" - he said - "I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing". (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
- Not from wealth comes virtue, but from virtue wealth and every other good. (Socrates)
- Riches don't make you rich but busy. (Fernando de Rojas)
- If your wealth is yours, why don't you take it with you to the other world? (Benjamin Franklin)
- There are fortunes that shout "Imbecile!" to honest man. (Edmond and Jules de Goncourt)
- Who has money sails with calm winds. (Petronius)
- With wealth, worries grow. (Fifth Horace Flacco)
- Anyone who is not handsome at twenty, strong at thirty, wise at forty, rich at fifty, cannot hope to become later. (Martin Luther)
- When the rich go to war, the poor die. (Jean Paul Sartre)
- Money doesn't make you rich if you don't know how to spend it. (Socrates)
- Those who adapt well to poverty are rich. (Seneca)
- The immoderate love of riches, if against justice, is impious, and if with justice, it is shameful; because it is unseemly conduct to save sordidly, even if in accordance with justice. (Epicurus)
- What we have in this country is socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. (Gore Vidal)
- The gods have not made it lawful for a man to have prosperity if he does not know what he wants and does not try to do it. (Xenophon)
- Nothing gives the illusion of intelligence like the possession of large sums of money. (John Kenneth Galbraith)
- Fame and wealth without intelligence are not sure possessions. (Democritus)
Phrases about wealth
- This Italy made of public poverty and private wealth. (Paolo Rumiz)
- If you lose wealth you don't lose anything; if you lose health you lose something; if you lose your personality you lose everything. (Billy Graham)
- Many despise wealth, but few can give it away. (François de La Rochefoucauld)
- Ordinary wealth can be stolen, true wealth cannot. In your soul there are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken away from you. (Oscar Wilde)
- There are two ways to get enough. One is to keep accumulating more and more. The other is to want less. (G.K Chesterton)
- For most wealthy people, the main pleasure of wealth is to show it off. (Adam Smith)
- A room can be defined as empty, if all the furniture is removed, if no furnishings are left inside; in that case it is defined as empty. It is empty of all that once contained, but it is also full: full of emptiness, full of itself. (Osho)
- Work ennobles man and enriches someone else. (Michelangelo)
- Capitalism is an unfair division of wealth. Communism is a just distribution of misery. (Winston Churchill)
- An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal disease of all republics. (Plutarch)
- An intelligent person must devote himself to acquiring what is strictly necessary, so as not to depend on anyone; but if, having reached this security, he wastes time to increase his wealth, he is a poor man. (Stendhal)
- The real test for our progress is not so much if we manage to increase the abundance of those who already have too much, but rather consists in trying to provide enough for those who have too little. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)
- Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman. (Mark Twain)
- I have always had the utmost contempt for wealth, not because I didn't like it, but because I hated the labors and worries that come with it. (Francesco Petrarca)
- I want to be rich one day. Some people become so rich that they lose all respect for humanity. It is so rich that I want to become. (Rita Rudner)
- The richest man is the one who is content with little, because contentment is the wealth given by nature. (Socrates)
- Reputation and credit depend only on the money that one has in the safe. (Juvenal)
- Ignorance degrades the human being only when he is associated with wealth. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
- You ask me what is the right measure of wealth? First have what you need, second enough. (Seneca)
- Our wealth dies with us, because we have it all in our head and nobody will be able to steal it, unless they cut off our heads and then ... we don't need anything anymore. (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
- There are people who have money and people who are rich. (Coco Chanel)
- It is very surprising that the riches of the men of the Church originated from the principles of poverty. (Montesquieu)
- Many take care of their wealth, more than the devil, the flames of hell. (Carlos Saweedra Weise)
- It is not true that being rich is that great fortune that everyone says. It only means taking it and taking it, laboring and laboring and continually wishing to be dead. (Mark Twain)
- Everyone loses what little they have: the poor their money, the middle class their security, the rich their dignity. (Tobias Gruterich)
- The real measure of your wealth is given by how much your value would be if you lost all your money. (Bernard Meltzer)
- Five or six rogues share the best and richest part of the world. This is enough to make us understand what kind of wealth is wealth before God. (Jean Domat)
- He who knows how to be poor in wealth is great. (Lucio Anneo Seneca)
- If you have a million dollars and you don't live in gratitude you are a really poor person. If you have very little but are grateful for what you have, you are really rich. (Anthony Robbins)
- The superior man cultivates virtue, the inferior man cultivates material well-being. The superior man cultivates justice, the inferior man cultivates the hope of receiving favors. (Confucius)
- Every morning I wake up and look at Forbes on the list of the richest men in America. If I can't find my name I go to work.(Robert Orben)
- Being happy is a natural wealth, luxury is an artificial poverty. (Socrates)
- Wealth is like sea water: the more you drink it, the more thirsty you are. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
- Freedom consists in being master of one's own life and in making little account of wealth. (Plato)
- Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't interest me. Going to bed at night knowing that we have done something wonderful: that's what interests me. (Steve Jobs)
- I want to make electricity so cheap that only the wealthy can afford the luxury of using candles. (Thomas Alva Edison)
- There are men who derive from their wealth only the fear of losing it. (Rivarol)
- If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it should not save the few who are rich. (John Fitzgerald Kennedy)
- I'd like to live like a poor man with a lot of money. (Pablo Picasso)
- Don't win friends with gifts; when you stop making them, they cease to love you. (Thomas Fuller)
- It's not that the rich man is bad; he's just too busy making money to be good. (Gerhard Uhlembruck)
- Master, I would like to know how fish live in the sea. "Like men on earth: the big ones eat the little ones". (William Shakespeare)
- You need to have the appetite of the poor to enjoy the wealth of the rich well. (Rivarol)
- If I keep my good character, I will be rich enough. (Apuleius)
- Do you think I want to marry you for your eight million dollars in dowry? How wrong you are! If you had nine million I would marry you anyway. (Groucho Marx)
- The budget must be balanced, the treasury cleared, the public debt reduced, the arrogance of moderate and controlled bureaucracy, and the assistance to foreign nations cut, to ensure that Rome does not go bankrupt. (Guide)
- I prefer to be able to appreciate the things that I cannot have than to have the things that I cannot appreciate. (Elbert Hubbard)
The defect inherent in capitalism is the unequal division of goods; the virtue inherent in socialism is the equal sharing of misery. (Sir Winston Churchill)
- I am truly wealthy, when my income is greater than my expenditure, and my expenditure is equal to my desires. (Edward Gibbon)
- Not from wealth but from virtues beauty is born. (Socrates)
- Everyone wants to travel with you in a limousine, but what you want is someone who takes the bus with you when the limousine breaks down. (Oprah Winfrey)
- Man is destroyed with politics without principles, with pleasure without conscience, with wealth without work, with knowledge without character, with business without morals, with science without humanity, with faith without sacrifices. (Mahatma Gandhi)
- You probably think that being rich like me is a great thing, and will I tell you the truth? it's not that bad. But the fact is that I sleep on the same mattress you sleep on and eat the same burgers you eat. You can live just as well as I live. Maybe I go to McDonald's to eat a little more often because I own it and when I leave this room, instead of by car, I go home by private jet. (Warren Buffet)
