Quotes by Philosophers - Page 192

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.
Alain de Botton
He is so rich, he has no room to shit.
Marcus Aurelius
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.
Socrates
The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.
Adam Smith
The rich man cannot enter the kingdom of heaven because he is already there.
David P. Gontar
But what they find most amazing and despicable is the insanity of those who all but worship the rich, to whom they owe nothing and who can do them no harm; they do so for no other reason except that they are rich, knowing full well that they are so mean and tightfisted that they will certainly never give them one red cent during their whole lives.
Thomas More
For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good.
G.K. Chesterton
For an entrepreneur: wealth invites fame. For a celebrity: fame invites wealth.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Like every other good thing in thisworld, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however,it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us beduly thankful for that, my dear Denis--duly thankful.
Aldous Huxley
No longer enslaved or made dependent by force of law, the great majority are so by force of poverty; they are still chained to a place, to an occupation, and to conformity with the will of an employer, and debarred, by the accident of birth both from the enjoyments, and from the mental and moral advantages, which others inherit without exertion and independently of desert. That this is an evil equal to almost any of those against which mankind have hitherto struggled, the poor are not wrong in believing. Is it a necessary evil? They are told so by, those who do not feel it---by those who have gained the prizes in the lottery of life. But it was also said that slavery, that despotism, that all the privileges of oligarchy, were necessary.
John Stuart Mill
For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them
Seneca
Or can it be thought that they who heap up an useless mass of wealth, not for any use that it is to bring them, but merely to please themselves with the contemplation of it, enjoy any true pleasure in it? The delight they find is only a false shadow of joy. Those are no better whose error is somewhat different from the former, and who hide it, out of their fear of losing it; for what other name can fit the hiding it in the earth, or rather the restoring to it again, it being thus cut off from being useful, either to its owner or to the rest of mankind? And yet the owner having hid it carefully, is glad, because he thinks he is now sure of it. It if should be stole, the owner, though he might live perhaps ten years after the theft, of which he knew nothing, would find no difference between his having or losing it; for both ways it was equally useless to him.
Thomas More
There really is no correlation between age and one’s bank balance. I’ve met wealthy boys and broke men.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Rich men use most of their money to get richer. Poor men use most of their money to look richer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
Will Durant
Egoism... is not eliminated by economic reorganization or by material abundance. When basic needs are satisfied, new 'needs' emerge. In our society, people want no simply clothes, but fashionable clothes; not shelter, but a house to display their wealth and taste.
Peter Singer
They wonder much to hear that gold which in itself is so useless a thing, should be everywhere so much esteemed, that even men for whom it was made, and by whom it has value, should yet be thought of less value than this metal. That a man of lead, who has no more sense than a log of wood, and is as bad as he is foolish, should have many wise and good men to serve him, only because he has a great heap of that metal...
Thomas More
The shortest route to wealth is the contempt of wealth.
Seneca
If you look on wealth as a thing to be valued your imaginary poverty will cause you torment.
Seneca
I don't know if you have any idea what a high school in Paris is like in this day and age in the posh neighborhoods—but quite honestly, the slummy banlieues of Marseille have nothing on ours. In fact it may even be worse here, because where you have money, you have drugs—and not just a little bit and not just one kind.
Muriel Barbery
A man is rich not only by what he has, but also, and above all, by what he doesn't.
Neel Burton
The rich will make temples for Siva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head the cupola of gold.
Basava
To attempt to increase the wealth of any country, either by introducing or by detaining in it an unnecessary quantity of gold and silver, is as absurd as it would be to attempt to increase the good cheer of private families by obliging them to keep an unnecessary number of kitchen utensils.
Adam Smith
Oh, what darkness does great prosperity cast over our minds!
Seneca
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T.F. Hodge
...what is the use of making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable?
Bertrand Russell
A man who has cured himself of all ridiculous prepossessions, and is fully, sincerely, and steadily convinced, from experience as well as philosophy, that the difference of fortune makes less difference in happiness than is vulgarly imagined; such a one does not measure out degrees of esteem according to the rent-rolls of his acquaintance. He may, indeed, externally pay a superior deference to the great lord above the vassal; because riches are the most convenient, being the most fixed and determinate, source of distinction. But his internal sentiments are more regulated by the personal characters of men, than by the accidental and capricious favours of fortune.
David Hume
Perhaps the answer is that it is necessary to slow down, finally giving up on economistic fanaticism and collectively rethink the true meaning of the word “wealth.” Wealth does not mean a person who owns a lot, but refers to someone who has enough time to enjoy what nature and human collaboration place within everyone’s reach. If the great majority of people could understand this basic notion, if they could be liberated from the competitive illusion that is impoverishing everyone’s life, the very foundations of capitalism, would start to crumble (p. 169).
Franco Bifo Berardi
What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster.
Ayn Rand
A taste for ostentation is rarely associated in the same souls with a taste for honesty
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
For the case that one thinks he has plateaued in life, God has already set yet another peak for him to reach: and a much more challenging peak than his own, one that which is to serve others.
Criss Jami
We always see other's wealth & lifestyle. But should not neglect their hard work as well...
Gargi
Unlike wealth, fame makes it easier for some men and more difficult for some to sleep around.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Poverty, like obesity, has the tendency to add at least ten years to the appearance of its victims, especially those who are over the age of twenty.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Other than the promise of life after death, nothing consoles the poor better than the fact that rich people are also subject to death.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
No paint or dye can give so splendid a colour as gilding. The merit of their beauty is greatly enhanced by their scarcity. With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves. In their eyes the merit of an object which is in any degree either useful or beautiful is greatly enhanced by its scarcity, or by the great labour which it requires to collect any considerable quantity of it, a labour which nobody can afford to pay but themselves.Book I, Chapter 11 - Rent of Land, part II
Adam Smith
From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure
Michel Foucault
What I'm sure of," he began, "is that you can't be happy without money. That's all. I don't like superficiality and I don't like romanticism. I like to be conscious. And what I've noticed is that there's a kind of spiritual snobbism in certain 'superior beings' who think that money isn't necessary for happiness. Which is stupid, which is false, and to a certain degree cowardly. You see, Mersault, for a man who is well born, being happy is never complicated. It's enough to take up the general fate, only not with the will for renunciation like so many fake great men, but with the will for happiness. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time. That's the only problem that's ever interested me. Very specific. Very clear."(...)"Oh, I know perfectly well that most rich men have no sense of happiness. But that's not the question. To have money is to have time. That's my main point. Time can be bought. Everything can be bought. To be or to become rich is to have time to be happy, if you deserve it.
Albert Camus
...Material goods have gained an increasing and finally inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.
Max Weber
Nor is he liberal who gives with pain; for he would prefer the wealth to the noble act, and this is not characteristic of a liberal man. But no more will the liberal man take from wrong sources; for such taking is not characteristic of the man who sets no store by wealth.
Aristotle
Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.
Ivan Illich
No one should ever be allowed to make you feel unworthy of becoming wealthy. Your wealth lies mainly upon your understanding of your worth.
Gift Gugu Mona
That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
They should own who can administer, not they who hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are, are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for more, opens a path for all. For he is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature is the problem of civilization.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same kind as you sow, and not to hope to buy one kind with an other kind. Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit, military success...Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points. Hotspur lives for the moment, praises himself for it, and despises Furlong, that he does not. Hotspur of course is poor, and Furlong is a good provider. The odd circumstance is that Hotspur thinks it a superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded with Furlong's lands.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is the sign of a weak mind to be unable to bear wealth.
Seneca
Great wealth, like a crowd at a concert,Gathers and melts.
Thiruvalluvar
Burning fevers flee no swifter from your body if you toss under figured counterpanes and coverlets of crimson than if you must lie in rude homespun.
Titus Lucretius Carus
wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state
Socrates
A community that is growing rich and seeks only to defend its goods and its reputation is dying. It has ceased to grow in love. A community is alive when it is poor and its members feel they have to work together and remain united, if only to ensure that they can all eat tomorrow!
Jean Vanier
...Individualistic material progress and the desire to gain prestige by coming out on top have taken over from the sense of fellowship, compassion and community. Now people live more or less on their own in a small house, jealously guarding their goods and planning to acquire more, with a notice on the gate that says, 'Beware of the Dog.
Jean Vanier
One man to live in pleasure and wealth, whiles all other weap and smart for it, that is the part not of a king, but of a jailor.
Thomas More
Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.
Arthur Schopenhauer
When people love each other, they are content with very little. When we have light and joy in our hearts, we don't need material wealth. The most loving communities are often the poorest. If our own life is luxurious and wasteful, we can't approach poor people. If we love people, we want to identify with them and share with them.
Jean Vanier
Wealth is the slave of a wise man. The master of a fool
Seneca
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
G.K. Chesterton
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Ayn Rand
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
Edmund Burke
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau