Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes on Money & Wealth (24 Quotes)

People say law but they mean wealth.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.

Without a rich heart wealth is an ugly beggar.

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage. They form at least a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned.

Money is of no value it cannot spend itself. All depends on the skill of the spender.

He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the plants, the waters, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments is the rich and royal man.

Money often costs too much.

Man was born to be rich, or grow rich by use of his faculties, by the union of thought with nature. Property is an intellectual production. The game requires coolness, right reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players. Cultivated labor drives out brute labor.

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the peo

No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it.

Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious. They are conservatives after dinner.

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.

Courage charms us, because it indicates that a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind.

There is a time when a man distinguishes the idea of felicity from the idea of wealth it is the beginning of wisdom.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

For me, commerce is of trivial import love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys

Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful

Money is the representative of a certain quantity of corn or other commodity. It is so much warmth, so much bread.

Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, 'If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you.

The first wealth is health.

It is a luxury to be understood.

There are three wants which never can be satisfied that of the rich, who wants something more that of the sick, who wants something different and that of the traveler, who says, 'Anywhere but here.'

A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist.