And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.

He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths - so that he could 'come over' some afternoon to a stranger's garden.

They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He somtimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.

Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. (201)

In ten seconds he had completely lost his appetite and gained on hundred thousand dollars.

Some of the top grossing movies now are children's animated features, they're making more money than action movies. And you'd never find a Hollywood A-lister years ago doing voice-overs for those films and they do now. You know why? Because everybody's got a price.

The dollar has lost over 90 percent of its value since the Fed was created.

I don't understand why everyone fights for power, money, fame.

I thought it'd be different. Kind of like, a lot of weight lifted off of my shoulders, as I don't have to worry about finances for the rest of my life, or my family's. But it wasn't like that. It was more - there's things I need to get done.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us - dreamers and indolent... It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich - these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

I feel terrible that I once put too much emphasis on material prosperity.