Honore de Balzac Quotes

Poverty wants some things, Luxury many things, Avarice all things

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything.

An excess of hoarded wealth is the death of many.

As riches grow, care follows, and a thirst For more and more.

Once a man has begun to accumulate money, it is unnatural to stop. He actually gets in a state where he wants more and more..

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

Poverty hath slain a thousand, but riches have slain ten thousand. They are very uncertain, they promise that which they cannot perform, neither can they afford a contented mind.

Poverty wants some, luxury many, and avarice all things.

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

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

There is always greed. There is nothing wrong with greed.

… an avalanche of avarice

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where the profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty.

We must expect for a long time yet to see capitalists still striving to obtain the highest possible profits. But observe, that the passion for wealth is certainly in some senses new. It grew up very rapidly at the beginning of the present century; it was not so strong in the last century, when men were much more content to lead a quiet easy life of leisure. The change has really influenced the relations between men; but in the future it is quite possible that the scramble for wealth may grow less intense, and a change in the opposite direction take place.

Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches; and tho' avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

The paid wealth which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, or by the incessant expansions of our population and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest; the luck of one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the very body and feature of man.

The poor man wants many things; the covetous man, all.

In the affairs of this world, poverty alone is without envy.

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.

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 people, lest civilization should be undone.

The accumulation of wealth is followed by an increase of care, and by an appetite for more.