C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Money
The life-blood of the nation.
Greatest god below the sky.
The almighty dollar!
The picklock that never fails.
Wisdom, knowledge, power,—all combined.
Money is a necessity; so is dirt.
Ready money is Aladdin’s lamp.
We are all slaves to the shining metal.
The dangers gather as the treasures rise.
Money is life to us wretched mortals.
If money go before, all ways do lie open.
This bank-note world.
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
Money is a good soldier, sir, and will on.
Money lost is bewailed with unfeigned tears.
Money, Paul, can do anything.
Excess of wealth is cause of covetousness.
What’s money without happiness?
Money makes a man laugh.
Money makes up in a measure all other wants in men.
The wretched impotence of gold.
Labor not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom.
All-powerful money supplies the place of birth and beauty.
Mammon is the largest slaveholder in the world.
Money is a handmaiden, if thou knowest to use it; a mistress if thou knowest not.
The use of money is all the advantage there is in having money.
If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.
Gold is the fool’s curtain, which hides all his defects from the world.
A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
For gold the merchant ploughs the main, the farmer ploughs the manor.
Money is power, and rare are the heads that can withstand the possession of great power.
Mammon wins his way where seraphs might despair.
He that wants money, means and content, is without three good friends.
Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet.
The deepest depth of vulgarism is that of setting up money as the ark of the covenant.
Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can.
Money is a good servant, but a dangerous master.
But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels.
All love has something of blindness in it, especially the love of money.
To despise money on some occasions is a very great gain.
Money brings honor, friends, conquest, and realms.
Money is a bottomless sea, in which honor, conscience, and truth may be drowned.
Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.
There is no place invincible, wherein an ass loaded with gold may enter.
Money often costs too much, and power and pleasure are not cheap.
The philosophy which affects to teach us a contempt of money does not run very deep.
What can money do to console a man with a headache?
Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.
One spade of gold undermines faster than a hundred mattocks of steel.
The persons who have the most sublime contempt for money are the same that have the strongest appetite for the pleasures it enables them to procure.
Money is a defence, but the excellency of knowledge is that wisdom giveth life.
As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves into money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this.
If you would know the value of money, go and try to borrow some; for he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.
Get to live; then live and use it, else it is not true that thou hast gotten. Surely use alone makes money not a contemptible stone.
The god of this world is riches, pleasure, and pride, wherewith it abuses all the creatures and gifts of God.
Covetous men need money least, yet most affect it; and prodigals, who need it most, do least regard it.
Commerce has set the mark of selfishness, the signet of its all-enslaving power, upon a shining ore, and called it gold.
By doing good with his money, a man as it were stamps the image of God upon it, and makes it pass current for the merchandise of heaven.
Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it there, and even spurn it back when it wishes to get farther.
The love of money is the root of all evil; which while some coveted after they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the bankers! How tenderly we look at her faults if she is a relative; what a kind, good-natured old creature we find her!
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.
Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant, accommodates itself to the meanest capacities, silences the loud and clamorous, and brings over the most obstinate and inflexible.
Money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.
It is my opinion that a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.
Money does all things,—for it gives and it takes away; it makes honest men and knaves, fools and philosophers; and so forward, mutatis mutandis, to the end of the chapter.
Money does all things for reward; some are pious and honest so long as they thrive upon it, but if the devil himself gives better wages, they soon change their party.
Whoever has sixpence is sovereign over all men,—to the extent of the sixpence; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him, to the extent of sixpence.
To cure us of our immoderate love of gain, we should seriously consider how many goods there are that money will not purchase, and these the best; and how many evils there are that money will not remedy, and these the worst.
O money, money, how blindly thou hast been worshipped, and how stupidly abused! Thou are health and liberty and strength, and he that has thee may rattle his pockets at the foul fiend!
The Romans worshipped their standard; and the Roman standard happened to be an eagle. Our standard is only one tenth of an eagle,—a dollar,—but we make all even by adoring it with tenfold devotion.
The love of money is a vertiginous pool, sucking all in to destroy it. It is troubled and uneven, giddy and unsafe; serving no end but its own, and that also in a restless and uneasy motion.
Character is money; and according as the man earns or spends the money, money in turn becomes character. As money is the most evident power in the world’s uses, so the use that he makes of money is often all that the world knows about a man.
Genius scorns the power of gold: it is wrong. Gold is the war-scythe on its chariot, which mows down the millions of its foes, and gives free passage to the sun-coursers with which it leaves those heavenly fields of light for the gross battlefields of earth.
But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air, and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up, and it cankers and breeds worms.
The avaricious love of gain, which is so feelingly deplored, appears to us a principle which, in able hands, might be guided to the most salutary purposes. The object is to encourage the love of labor, which is best encouraged by the love of money.
When money represents many things, not to love it would be to love nearly nothing. To forget true needs can be only a feeble moderation; but to know the value of money and to sacrifice it always, maybe to duty, maybe even to delicacy, that is real virtue.
Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That was a true proverb of the wise man, rely upon it; “Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure and trouble there with.”
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.
We must learn that competence is better than extravagance, that worth is better than wealth, that the golden calf we have worshiped has no more brains than that one of old which the Hebrews worshiped. So beware of money and of money’s worth as the supreme passion of the mind. Beware of the craving for enormous acquisition.
The value of a dollar is to buy just things; a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius and all the virtue of the world. A dollar in a university is worth more than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding community than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and arsenic are in constant play.
Midas longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians. He got gold, so that whatever he touched became gold, and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it. Midas had insulted Apollo and the gods; the gods gave him his wish, and a pair of long ears, which also were a good appendage to it. What a truth in these old fables!