Perception of Wealth Quotes

Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.

I never could understand the popular belief that because a man makes a lot of money he has a lot of brains. Some very rich men who made their fortunes have been among the stupidest men I have ever met.

People like to build their own story about my life. I don't know if it makes them feel better, or if it makes it okay for them to not like me, but the last thing I grew up as was rich.

Plenty and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of them; and riches, like glory of health, have no more beauty or pleasure than their possessor is pleaded to lend them.

Rich is he who thinks he is rich and poor is he who thinks he is poor.

I was sometimes embarrassed about making it - people look at you in a different way. You become this rich guy with the house. I wouldn't trade my life for anyone else's, but I've sometimes felt set apart from the people I work with. They think, "You're rich - you don't have problems."

The intelligent poor individual was a much finer observer than the intelligent rich one. The poor individual looks around him at every step, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets; thus, every step he takes presents a problem, a task, for his thoughts and feelings. He is alert and sensitive, he is experienced, his soul has been burned.

The difference between us and other people is that their money looks bigger and their troubles smaller.

Who is richer? The man who is seen, but cannot see? Or the man who is not being seen, but can see?

Nothing made the horse so fat as the king's eye.

The information revolution has changed people's perception of wealth. We originally said that land was wealth. Then we thought it was industrial production. Now we realize it's intellectual capital. The market is showing us that intellectual capital is far more important that money. This is a major change in the way the world works. the same thing that happened to the farmers during the Industrial Revolution is now happening to people in industry as we move into the information age.

Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests. In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind.

Those that say they despise riches are saints or liars.

I've got bills to pay like everyone else. I'm a high-earner but I don't see myself as rich. I know in some people's eyes I probably am, but I will always have to work. My son Matt asked me if we were rich the other day and I told him that in my view, being rich is not having to get up to go to work. I can't see myself ever being in that position.

Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition. A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile...But this happy sensation wears off. After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

Many people come here and they think my apartment is a poor relative to my name. But you cannot be radical and have money, it’s impossible.

We are so vain as to set the highest value upon those things to which nature has assigned the lowest place. What can be more coarse and rude in the mind than the precious metals, or more slavish and dirty than the people that dig and work them? And yet they defile our minds more than our bodies, and make the possessor fouler than the artificer of them. Rich men, in fine, are only the greater slaves.

Men seem neither to understand their riches nor their strength. Of the former they believe greater things than they should; of the latter, less.

In civilized society external advantages make us more respected. A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one. You may analyze this and say, What is there in it? But that will avail you nothing, for it is a part of a general system.

You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they're saying. You'll never believe what they mean by 'middle class.' They mean themselves.

Think rich, look poor.

This is important. Money on its most basic level is a hard fact - you either have it or you don't. But on it's emotional level it is purely a fiction. It becomes what you let it become.

A wise man looks upon men as he does on horses; all their caparisons of title, wealth, and place, he considers but as harness.

Our inability to recall how we really felt is why our wealth of experiences turns out to be poverty of riches.

I don't want people to get the impression that I just got money and now I'm cocky, because I'm not. I'm just a little overly confident.