Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil.

There is only one vice, which may be found in life with as strong features, and as high a colouring as needs be employed by any satyrist or comic poet; and that is AVARICE.

The love for money is only one among many.

Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.

Avarice is a uniform and tractable vice; other intellectual distempers are different in different constitutions of mind. That which soothes the pride of one will offend the pride of another, but to the favor of the covetous bring money, and nothing is denied.

Avarice, or the desire of gain, is a universal passion which operates at all times, at all places, and upon all persons.

It is not the creation of wealth that is wrong, but the love of money for its own sake.

Every man now worships gold, all other reverence being done away.

Our fathers worshiped the golden calf. The worst you can say of an American now is, he worships the gold of the calf.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

O accursed hunger of gold, to what dost thou not compel human hearts!

The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites.

Who values gold above all, considers all else as trifling.

The cursed hunger for gold. -Auri sacra fames

Covetousness teaches people to be cruel and crafty, industrious and evil, full of care and malice; and after all this, it is for no good to itself, for it dares not spend those heaps of treasure which it has snatched.

Avarice is fear sheathed in gold.

What treasures here do Mammon's sons behold! Yet know that all that which glitters is not gold.

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

Avarice and luxury, those evils which have been the ruin of every great state.

Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.

Money does not sate Avarice, but stimulates it.

It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, Covetousness has gone forward and never looked back.

So for a good old-gentlemanly vice, I think I must take up with avarice.

Avarice is the most oppose of all characters to that of God Almighty, whose alone it is to give and not receive.