Relative Wealth Quotes

See how many are better off than you are, but consider how many are worse.

It's nice, being brought up with no money at all. It's just not how I measure success, so that makes it a bunch easier.

I'm not broke. Like everybody else, I owe money.

Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level.

Wealth after all is a relative thing since he that has little and wants less is richer than he that has much and wants more.

We may feel the pain of falling back from a level of affluence to which we have grown accustomed, but most people in developed countries are still, by historical standards, extraordinarily well off.

A man's wealth must be determined by the relation of his desires and expenditures to his income. If he feels rich on ten dollars, and has everything else he desires, he really is rich.

There's not too many people that don't think I'm crazy, for walking away from so much money. I'm at a restaurant with my wife, it's a nice restaurant, we're eating dinner. I look across the room, I say, 'You see this guy over here, across the room? He has $100 million.' And we're eating the same entree. So, OK, fine, I don't have $50 million or whatever it was, but say I have $10 million in the bank. The difference in lifestyle is miniscule.

What I call loaded, I'm not. What other people call loaded I am.

As a child, as far as I was concerned, my dad had an amazing job, and we had all the money we needed. My life was so fun and carefree that I didn't realize at all that we weren't rich - until I met someone rich. Still, I've never met a rich kid who grew up as happy as I did.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.

I didn't grow up with great privilege, nor did I grow up wanting for anything. I was a middle-class kid and, relative to the rest of the world, that's great wealth.

At least in the United States, most economic resentment is not directed toward billionaires or high-roller financiers - not even corrupt ones. It's directed at the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise. It's directed at the husband of your wife's sister, because he earns 20 percent more than you do.

I preach that anybody can improve their lives. I think God wants us to be prosperous. I think he wants us to be happy. To me, you need to have money to pay your bills. I think God wants us to send our kids to college. I think he wants us to be a blessing to other people. But I don't think I'd say God wants us to be rich. It's all relative, isn't it?

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

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

One says that money doesn't buy happiness. Without a doubt, one was speaking of the money of others.

Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count.

Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.

Missing out on some opportunity never bothers us. What's wrong with someone getting a little richer than you? It's crazy to worry about this.

the art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in your own favour'.

Even when I was living below the poverty line as a novelist, I was still living better than 99.5% of the human population of the world. But in my little, soft realm of trying to amuse a few dozen middle-class people with my books and articles, I did struggle to survive in my own way.