It’s just, when you buy furniture, you tell yourself: that’s it, that’s the last sofa I’m gonna need. No matter what else happens, I’ve got that sofa problem handled. I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was so close to being complete.
- Narrator in Fight Club
The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.
- John Maynard Keynes1
And do not kill your children for fear of poverty; We give them sustenance and yourselves (too); surely to kill them is a great wrong.
- The Koran, The Children of Israel, 17.31
Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
- Samuel Johnson1
It is not righteousness that you turn your faces towards the East and the West, but righteousness is this that one should believe in Allah and the last day and the angels and the Book and the prophets, and give away wealth out of love for Him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and the beggars and for (the emancipation of) the captives, and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate; and the performers of their promise when they make a promise, and the patient in distress and affliction and in time of conflicts– these are they who are {rue (to themselves) and these are they who guard (against evil).
- The Koran, The Cow 2.117
Tyler Durden: We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.
Narrator: Martha Stewart.
Tyler Durden: [...] Martha Stewart! Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic; it’s all going down, man. So [...] off with your sofa units and your Strinne green stripe patterns. I say, never be complete. I say, stop being perfect. I say, let’s evolve, and let the chips fall where they may.
Many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my monies, and my usuances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to then: you come to me, and you say,
Shylock, we would have monies; You say so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard,
And foot me, as you would spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold; monies is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say,
Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats? or
Shall I bend low, and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness,
Say this, —
Fair sir, you spet on me Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me — dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you thus much monies?
- William Shakespeare1
When I go to my office every morning, I feel like I’m going to the Sistine Chapel to paint.
-Warren Buffett (“Eye” Women’s Wear Daily, October 10, 1985, p. 10)
You shall not charge interest on loans to your brother, interest on money, interest on food, interest on anything that is lent for interest.
- Deuteronomy 23:19 (ESV)
You shall not charge interest to your countrymen: interest on money, food, or anything that may be loaned at interest.
- Deuteronomy 23:19 (NASB)
Do not charge your brother interest, whether on money or food or anything else that may earn interest.
- Deuteronomy 23:19 (NIV)
It is better to live rich, than to die rich.
- Samuel Johnson1