This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"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." -
"A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm’s length, but he places it by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!" - Charles Lamb
"By your friends I gauge your wealth; by your enemies, your greatness." - Judah Lazerov, fully Judah Leib Lazerov
"The wealth of the soul is the only true wealth." - Lucian, aka Lucian of Samosata or Lucianus Samosatensis NULL
"The greatest wealth is to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied... but no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth." - Lucretius, fully Titus Lucretius Carus NULL
"A man may be a miser of his wealth; he may tie up his talent in a napkin; he may hug himself in his reputation; but he is always generous in his love. Love cannot keep it to himself. Like light is constantly traveling. A man must spend it, must give it away." - Norman Macleod
"Every good act is charity. Your smiling in your brother's face, is charity; an exhortation of your fellow-man to virtuous deeds, is equal to alms-giving; your putting a wanderer in the right road, is charity; your removing stones, and thorns, and other obstructions from the road, is charity; your giving water to the thirsty, is charity. A man's true wealth hereafter, is the good he does in this world to his fellow-man. When he dies, people will say, "What property has he left behind him?" but the angels will ask, "What good deeds has he sent before him."" -
"That man has the fewest wants who is the least anxious for wealth." - Publius Syrus
"There are men who gain from their wealth only the fear of losing it." - Antoine de Rivarol, also known as Comte de Rivarol
"Almost all men are over-anxious. No sooner do they enter the world than they lose that taste fore natural and simple pleasures so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth or honor; and on they go as their fathers went before them, till, weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of their childhood." - Samuel Rogers
"Wealth consists in talent, not in possessions; greatness, in understanding, not in age." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL
"Maybe we’re just one experiment... Maybe we’re part of the creator’s great caldron, boiling with a wealth of phenomena that the most learned physicians and physicists are just beginning to figure out... I think it’s impossible to think our being here is the result of chance. I think we’re part of a master plan known only to the Creator." - Cory SerVaas
"Lost wealth may be restored by industry, the wreck of health regained by temperance, forgotten knowledge restored by study, alienated friendship smoothed into forgetfulness, even forfeited reputation won by penitence and virtue. But who ever looked upon his vanished hours, recalled his slighted years, stamped them with wisdom, or effaced from Heaven's record the fearful blot of wasted time?" - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley
"Never live in hope or expectation, while your arms are folded. God helps those that help themselves. Providence smiles on those who put their shoulders to the wheel that propels to wealth and happiness." - Charles Simmons
"A good wife is heaven’s last, best gift to man - his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her arms the pale of his safety, her industry his surest wealth, her economy his safest steward, her lips his faithful counselors, her bosom the softest pillow of his care." - Jeremy Taylor
"I have no riches but my thoughts, yet these are wealth enough for me." - Sara Teasdale, born Sara Trevor Teasdale, aka Sara Teasdale Filsinger
"Inherited wealth... is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to mortality." - William K. Vanderbilt, fully William Kissam Vanderbilt
"The best definition of wealth - the only true definition, I think - is the possession of whatever gives us happiness, contentment or a sense of one's significance in the scheme of things." - Ernest W. Watson
"Wealth is not acquired, as many persons supposed, by fortunate speculations and splendid enterprises, but by the daily practice of industry, frugality, and economy. He who relies upon these means will rarely be found destitute, and he who relies upon any other will generally become bankrupt." - Francis Wayland
"The safest wealth is lack of needs." - Franz Werfel, fully Franz Viktor Werfel
"Not from successful love alone, nor wealth, nor honor’d middle age, nor victories of politics or war; but as life wanes, and all the turbulent passions calm, as gorgeous, vapory, silent hues cover the evening sky, as softness, fulness, rest, suffuse the frame, like fresher, balmier air, as days take on a mellower light, and the apple at last hangs really finish’d and indolent-ripe on the tree, then for the teeming quietest, happiest days of all! The brooding and blissful halcyon days!" - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"He is a great simpleton who imagines that the chief power of wealth is to supply wants. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it creates more wants than it supplies. Excessive wealth is neither glory nor happiness." - William Wirt
"Perhaps the biggest danger is the way a culture of self-help fosters both feelings of inadequacy and hopes for unattainable ideals… foolproof prescriptions for fulfillment and meaningful lives. The futile quest to become a complete all-round wonderful person, fully in control of our health, wealth and happiness." - Julian Baggini
"One cannot say one controls a country if one does not control its wealth." - José Celso Barbosa
"When you find wealth within your reach, do not try to get it by improper means; when you meet with calamity, do not (try to) escape from it by improper means. Do not seek for victory in small contentions; do not seek for more than your proper share. Do not positively affirm what you have doubts about; and (when you have no doubts) do not let what you say appear (simply) as your own view." - Book of Li, aka Book of Rites or Record of Rites or Classic Rites NULL
"When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men’s souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals." - Winston Churchill, fully Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill
"He does not see, poor wretch, that his life is but a gilded torture, that he is bound fast by his wealth, and that his money owns him rather than he owns it." - Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL
"The great fault of modern democracy - a fault that is common to the capitalist and the socialist - is that it accepts economic wealth as the end of society and the standard of personal happiness." - Christopher Henry Dawson
"Faith is wealth! Obedience is wealth! Modesty also is wealth! Hearing is wealth, and so is Charity! Wisdom is sevenfold riches." - Dhammapada NULL
"But perhaps you are deceived by the fact that many who know not God possess wealth in abundance, are full of honors, and enjoy great authority. These unhappy men are uplifted the higher, that their fall may be greater." - Maracus Minucius Felix
"It is not a crime to be rich, nor a virtue to be poor… The sin lies in hoarding wealth and keeping it from circulating freely to all who need it." - Charles Fillmore
"An unhurried sense of time is in itself a form of wealth." - Bonnie Friedman
"God is no dictator. He leaves us the freedom to master ourselves." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundation, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe." - Henry George
"The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving." - Russell Green
"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
"The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments... Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time... Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"What the world needs is a sense of ultimate embarrassment. Modern man has the power and the wealth to overcome poverty and disease, but he has no wisdom to overcome suspicion. We are guilty of misunderstanding the meaning of existence; we are guilty of distorting our goals and misrepresenting our souls. We are better than our assertions, more intricate, more profound than our theories maintain." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"How can true happiness proceed from wealth, which in its acquisition causes pain; ;in loss, affliction; in abundance, folly." - Hitopadesa, translated means Book of Good Counsels NULL
"Wealth and fame are of dubious value when we think that life is like a fleeting dream." - Li Ju-chen
"Do not care overly much for wealth or power or fame, or one day you will meet someone who cares for none of these things, and you will realize how poor you have become." - Rudyard Kipling
"Wealth and kinsfolk are as borrowed things. All borrowed things must one day be returned." - Labid NULL
"Greed for enlightenment and immortality is no different than greed for material wealth." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze