Great Throughts Treasury

"Riches in their acquisition bring pain and suffering, in their loss manifold trouble and sorrow, in their possession a wild intoxication. How can we say that they confer happiness?" - Hitopadesa or The Hitopadesa or Hitopadesha NULL

"To equal justice appertaineth also the equal imposition of taxes; the equality whereof dependeth not on the equality of riches, but on the equality of the debt that every man oweth to the commonwealth for his defense." - Thomas Hobbes

"A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty." - David Hume

"To be happy, the temperament must be cheerful and gay, not gloomy and melancholy. A propensity to hope and joy, is real riches; one to fear and sorrow is real poverty." - David Hume

"Of riches it is not necessary to write the praise. Let it, however, be remembered that he who has money to spare has it always in his power to benefit others, and of such power a good man must always be desirous." -

"The whole world is put in motion by the wish for riches and the dread of poverty." -

"Wit will never make a man rich, but there are places where riches will always make a wit." -

"Riches are chiefly good because they give us time." - Charles Lamb

"Were a man to order his life by the rules of true reason, a frugal substance joined to contented mind is for him great riches; for never is there any lack of a little." - Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL

"That plenty should produce either covetousness or prodigality is a perversion of providence; and yet the generality of men are the worse for their riches." - William Penn

"Ranks and riches are chains of gold, but still chains." - Giovani Ruffini

"The glory of riches and of beauty is frail and transitory; virtue remains bright and eternal." -

"Those who obtain riches by labor, care, and watching, know their value. Those who impart them to sustain and extend knowledge, virtue, and religion, know their use. Those who lose them by accident or fraud know their vanity. And those who experience the difficulties and dangers of preserving them know their perplexities." - Charles Simmons

"The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it." - Lawrence Sterne, alternatively Laurence Sterne

"Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff

"I have no riches but my thoughts, yet these are wealth enough for me." - Sara Teasdale, born Sara Trevor Teasdale, aka Sara Teasdale Filsinger

"Few and precious are the words which the lips of Wisdom utter. To what shall their rarity be likened? What price shall count their worth? Perfect and much to be desired, and giving joy with riches, no lovely thing on earth can picture all their beauty." -

"Poverty cannot debase sturdy souls, nor riches lift up mean ones." -

"Want of desire is the greatest riches." - Étienne Vigée, fully Louis-Jean-Baptiste-Étienne Vigée

"To value riches is not to be covetous. They are the gift of God, and, like every gift of his, good in themselves, and capable of good use. But to overvalue riches, to give them a place in the heart, which God did not design them to fill, this is covetousness." - Herman Lincoln Wayland

"Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you." -

"The man whom neither riches nor luxury nor grandeur can render happy may, with a book in his hand, forget all his troubles under the friendly shade of every tree, and may experience pleasures as infinite as they are varied, as pure as they are lasting, as lively as they are unfading, and as compatible with every public duty as they are contributory to private happiness." - Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

"There is, above all, the laughter that comes from the eternal joy of creation, the joy of making the world new, the joy of expressing the inner riches of the soul - laughter from triumphs over pain and hardship in the passion for an enduring ideal, the joy of bringing the light of happiness, of truth and beauty into a dark world. This is divine laughter par excellence." - John Elof Boodin

"There is nothing so characteristic of narrowness and littleness of soul as the love of riches." -

"Faith is wealth! Obedience is wealth! Modesty also is wealth! Hearing is wealth, and so is Charity! Wisdom is sevenfold riches." - Dhammapada NULL

"If your riches are yours, why don’t you take them with you to t’other world?" - Benjamin Franklin

"Real joy comes not from ease or riches or praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile." - Wilfred Grenfell, fully Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

"He who has enough to satisfy what he wants, and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance - all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality and pride." - Henry of Langenstein NULL

"God might grant us riches, honors, long life and health, but many times to our own hurt: for whatsoever is pleasing to us, is not always healthful for us." -

"A people only become unmanageable when one tries to lead them with a violent love…. Bit if one approaches them with trust and takes them by the hand, if one lures them forward with riches and drives them from behind with just punishment… there will not be a single one who will not adapt himself to the ruler." - Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL

"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." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Covetousness makes a man miserable, because riches are not means to make a man happy." - Jeremy Taylor

"Never forget: the secret of creating riches for oneself is to create them for others." - John Templeton, fully Sir John Marks Templeton

"Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you." -

"A man's felicity consists not in the outward and visible blessings of fortune, but in the inward and unseen perfections and riches of the mind." - Anacharsis NULL

"By wisdom wealth is won; but riches purchased wisdom yet for none." - Bayard Taylor

"The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”" - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"What but this faculty of imagination dispenses reputation, awards respect and veneration to persons, works, laws, and the great? How insufficient are all the riches of the earth without her consent!" - Blaise Pascal

"Of all the riches that we hug, of all the pleasures we enjoy, we can carry no more out of this world than out of a dream." - Bonnell Thornton

"A book can give greater riches than any; other form of recreation but it cannot provide the last answers. They must be found in the loneliness of a man's own mind. Books can help a man be ready for those moments. But neither books nor teachers can provide the answers." - Carl Sandburg

"Despise riches if you would have a happy mind." - Cato the Elder, Marcus Porius Cato, aka Censorius (the Censor), Sapiens (the Wise), Priscus (the Ancient) NULL

"A man that depends on the riches and honors of this world, forgetting God and the welfare of his soul, is like a little child that holds a fair apple in the hand, of agreeable exterior, promising goodness, but that within its rotten and full of worms." - Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens

"Augur said, " Give me neither poverty or riches"' and this will ever be the prayer of the wise. Our incomes should be like our shoes: if too small, they will gall and pinch us, but if too large, they will cause us to stumble and to trip. But wealth, after all, is a relative thing, since he that has little, and wants less, is richer than he that has much, but wants more." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming its slave; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Men pursue riches under the idea that their possession will set them at ease and above the world. But the law of association often makes those who begin by loving gold as a servant, finish by becoming its slaves; and independence without wealth is at least as common as wealth without independence." - Charles Caleb Colton

"The only things in which we can be said to have any property are our actions. Our thoughts may be bad, yet produce no poison; they may be good, yet produce no fruit. Our riches may be taken away by misfortune, our reputation by malice, our spirits by calamity, our health by disease, our friends by death. But our actions must follow us beyond the grave; with respect to them alone, we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Did it ever strike you that goodness is not merely a beautiful thing, but by far the most beautiful thing in the whole world? So that nothing is to be compared for value with goodness; that riches, honor, power, pleasure, learning, the whole world and all in it, are not worth having in comparison with being good; and the utterly best thing for a person is to be good, even though they were never to be rewarded for it." -

"Riches do not delight us so much with their possession, as torment us with their loss." - Dick Gregory

"The contempt of riches in the philosophers was a concealed desire of revenging on fortune the injustice done to their merit, by despising the good she denied them." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt

"Frugality is founded on the principle that all riches have limits." - Edmund Burke