This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Learning is the only wealth tyrants cannot despoil. Only death can dim the lamp of knowledge that is within you. The true wealth of a nation lies not in its gold or silver but in its learning, wisdom, and in the uprightness of its sons.
The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes a cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces. The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world. Labour not only produces commodities. It also produces itself and the worker as a commodity, and indeed in the same proportion as it produces commodities in general.
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Without doubt, the highest privilege of wealth is the opportunity it affords for doing good, without giving up one’s fortune.
Doubt | Fortune | Giving | Good | Opportunity | Wealth | Privilege |
Where wealth is, there are also all manner of sins; for through wealth comes pride, through pride dissension, through dissension wars, through wars, poverty, through poverty, great distress and misery. Therefore, they that are rich, must yield a strict and great account; for to whom much is given, of him much will be required.
Panchatantra or The Panchatantra NULL
Get wealth when you have it not; guard what you have got; increase what you have guarded; and bestow on worthy persons what you have increased.
Wealth |
The origin of all wars is the pursuit of wealth, and we are forced to pursue wealth because we live in slavery to the cares of the body.
There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Art | Individual | Man | Prosperity | Thought | Wealth | Will | Thought |
The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one; it must husband its resources to live. But health answers its own ends, and has to spare; runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities.
The first wealth is health. Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one; it must husband its resources to live.
We have among us a class of mammon worshippers, whose one test of conservatism or radicalism is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what is called socialism.
Conservatism | Radicalism | Respect | Wealth | Respect |
Saint Gregory, aka Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory the Dialogist, "Gregory the Great" NULL
The possession of virtue… is always abundant for those who desire it, not like the possession of the earthly, in which those who divide it off into pieces for themselves must take their share from that of the other, and the gain of the one is the neighbor’s loss. From this, because of hatred of loss, arise fights concerning wealth. But the wealth of [virtue] is unenvied, and he who [gains] more brings no penalty to him who is worth of also participating equally in it.
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
No wealth can surpass contentment.
Contentment | Wealth |