Great Throughts Treasury

"It is impossible to conceive any contrast more entire and absolute than that which exists between a heart glowing with love to God, and a heart in which the love of money has cashiered all sense of God - His love, His presence, His glory; and which is no sooner relieved from the mockery of a tedious round of religious formalism than it reverts to the sanctuaries where its wealth is invested, with an intenseness of homage surpassing that of the most devout Israelite who ever, from a foreign land, turned his longing eyes toward Jerusalem." - Richard Fuller

"Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they'd be collecting. Margaret Mead gets cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing some very important things because they're worried and excited and I'm going to make them relax and stop doing those things. But we're dealing with something much bigger than we're accustomed to understanding, we're on a very large course indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there's no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller

"I have no complex about wealth. I have worked hard for my money, producing things people need. I believe that the able industrial leader who creates wealth and employment is more worthy of historical notice than politicians or soldiers." - J. Paul Getty, fully Jean Paul Getty

"People who make money often make mistakes, and even have major setbacks, but they believe they will eventually prosper, and they see every setback as a lesson to be applied in their toward success." - Jerry Gillies

"Boredom is the keynote of poverty... for when there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine." - Moss Hart

"He who loses money losses much. He who loses a friend loses more. But he who loses faith loses all." - Henry H. Haskins

"To learn the value of money, it is not necessary to know the nice things it can get for you, you have to have experienced the trouble of getting it." - Philippe Hériat, pen name of Raymond-Gerard Payelle

"Wealth brings noble opportunities, and competence is a proper object of pursuit; but wealth, and even competence, may be bought at too high a price. Wealth itself has no moral attribute. It is not money, but the love of money, which is the root of all evil. It is the relation between wealth and the mind and the character of its possessor which is the essential thing." - George Stillman Hillard

"Money spent on ourselves may be a millstone about the neck; spent on others it may give us wings like eagles." - Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

"Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools." - Thomas Hobbes

"No man's credit is as good as his money." - E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe

"Cheerfulness is like money well expended in charity; the more we dispense of it, the greater our possession." - Victor Hugo

"Money may be the husk of many things, but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness." -

"Money and time are the heaviest burdens of life, and the unhappiest of all mortals are those who have more of either than they know how to use." -

"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." -

"Wealth is nothing in itself; it is not useful but when it departs from us; its value is found only in that which it can purchase. As to corporeal enjoyment, money can neither open new avenues of pleasure, nor block up the passages of anguish. Disease and infirmity still continue to torture and enfeeble, perhaps exasperated by luxury, or promoted by softness. With respect to the mind, it has rarely been observed that wealth contributes much to quicken the discernment or elevate the imagination, but may, by hiring flattery, or laying diligence asleep, confirm error and harden stupidity." -

"You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury than by giving; you make them exert industry, whereas, by giving it, you keep them idle." -

"Some men make money not for the sake of living, but ache in blindness of greed and live for their fortune's sake." - Juvenal, fully Decimus Junius Juvenalis NULL

"Education is not a product: mark, diploma, job, money - in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one." - Bel Kaufman

"Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things [money, power and fame]... and then you will know how poor you are." - Rudyard Kipling

"Money is the sinews of war." - Libanius NULL

"A heart without affection is like a purse without money." - Benjamin B. Joseph Mandelstamm

"Money-giving is a very good criterion of a person's mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally ill people." -

"Much work is merely a way to make money; much leisure is merely a way to spend it." - C. Wright Mills, fully Charles Wright Mills

"It is harder to keep money than to get it." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Time is money." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities. But if the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not in the same manner unite individuals. We see that in countries where the people move only by the spirit of commerce, they make a traffic of all the humane, all the moral virtues; the most trifling things, those which humanity would demand, are there done, or there given, only for money." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"The greatest security of the liberties of a people who do not cultivate the earth is their not knowing the use of money... The people who have no money have but few wants; and these are supplied with ease, and in an equal manner. Equality is then unavoidable; and hence it proceeds that their chiefs are not despotic." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

"I believe the recipe for happiness to be just enough money to pay the monthly bills you acquire, a little surplus to give you confidence, a little too much work each day, enthusiasm for your work, a substantial share of good health, a couple of real friends, and a wife and children to share life's beauty with you." - John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley

"To commiserate is sometimes more than to give, for money is external to a man's self, but he who bestows compassion communicates his own soul." - William Mountford

"Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell." - Clint Williams Murchison, Sr.

"The greatest humbug in the world is the idea that money can make a man happy. I never had any satisfaction with mine until I began to do good with it." - Charles Pratt, 1st Earl of Camden

"A good reputation is more valuable than money." - Publius Syrus

"When reason rules, money is a blessing." - Publius Syrus

"Money is both the generation and corruption of purchased honor; honor is both the child and slave of potent money: the credit which honor hath lost, money hath found. When honor grew mercenary, money grew honorable. The way to be truly noble is to contemn both." - Francis Quarles

"No man needs money so much as he who despises it." -

"Sacrifice money rather than principle." - Mayer Rothschild, fully Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild

"The money which a man possesses is the instrument of freedom; that which we eagerly pursue is the instrument of slavery." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"The money of the miser is coming out of the earth when he is himself going into it." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor to find much fun in life." - Charles Michael Schwab

"There is nothing that we an properly call our own but our time, and yet everybody fools us out of it who has a mind to do it. If a man borrows a paltry sum of money, there must needs be bonds and securities, and every common civility is presently charged upon account. But he who has my time thinks he owes me nothing for it, though it be a debt that gratitude itself can never repay." -

"It happens a little unluckily that the persons who have the most infinite contempt of money are the same that have the strongest appetite for the pleasures it procures." - William Shenstone

"Our doctor would never really operate unless it was necessary. He was just that way. If he didn't need the money, he wouldn't lay a hand on you." -

"Religion... sex... race... money... avoidance rites... malnutrition... dreams - no part of these can be looked at and clearly seen without looking at the whole of them. For, as a painter mixes colors and makes of them new colors, so religion is turned into something different by race, and segregation is colored as much by sex as by skin pigment, and money is no longer a coin but a lost wish wandering through a man’s whole life." - Lillian Smith, fully Lillian Eugenia Smith

"Ethics is the science of human duty. Arithmetic tells man how to count his money; ethics how he should acquire it, whether by honesty or fraud. Geography is a map of the world; ethics is a beautiful map of duty. This ethics is not Christianity, it is not even religion; but it is the sister of religion, because the path of duty is in full harmony, as to quality and direction, with the path of God." - David Swing, aka Professor Swing

"The greed of gain has no time or limit to its capaciousness. Its one object is to produce and consume. It has pity neither for beautiful nature nor for living human beings. It is ruthlessly ready without a moment's hesitation to crush beauty and life out of them, molding them into money." -

"Old age brings this one vice to mankind, that we all think too much of money." - Terence, full Latin name Publius Terentius Afer NULL

"You can be young without money but you can’t be old without it." - Tennessee Williams, fully Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams

"Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the money to do it right." -

"Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did." - James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin