Wealth and luxury

“ Luxury has grown on us since the thousands of wealthy idlers who draw their money from trade began to make the stream of lavish expenditure turn into a series of rushing rapids. The flow of wasted wealth is no longer like the equable gliding of the full Thames ”

“ You have lived surrounded by wealth and a good deal of luxury; but the luxury in which you were lapped was the comfort with which a man of great working brain, who has well earned the right to spend freely, chose to take for his own rest and amusement, knowing well the value of every cent he has spent or given away. ”

“ But, without insisting on the necessity of sumptuary laws, can it be denied that rectitude of morals is essential to the duration of empires, and that luxury is diametrically opposed to such rectitude? Let it be admitted that luxury is a certain indication of wealth; that it even serves, if you will, to increase such wealth: what conclusion is to be drawn from this paradox, so worthy of the times? ”

“ From this point of view all the products of human labor have been, and in turn have ceased to be, articles of luxury, since we mean by luxury nothing but a relation of succession, whether chronological or commercial, in the elements of wealth. ”

“ Luxury is the child of wealth; and wealth is acquired by states, as by private people, either by a lucrative, or by an onerous title, as the civilians speak. The lucrative title, by which a state acquires, is either by rapine, or from her mines; the onerous title, or that for a valuable consideration, is by industry. ”

“ I have not time (nor is the question a part of my subject) to discuss what should be done with the money hitherto spent in idle luxury. We know, however, that we have the poor always with us, and that we can always learn the luxury of doing good. In one way or another we ought to see that our superfluous wealth should drain from the high lands into the valleys; not indeed to make the poor luxurious, but to provide them with comfort, to give them health, strength, and enjoyment. ”

“ The term luxury, in referring to the state of society before the Revolution, meant the lavish expenditure of wealth by the rich to gratify a refined sensualism, while the masses of the people were suffering lack of the primary necessities. ”

“ Here wealth merely represents the absence of those petty and worrying annoyances which narrow the circle of thought, when a grim vision of the weekly bills is seldom long absent from the mind. She has magnificence, luxury, refinement all round her, and imbibes a grace from the very furniture and ornaments of her room. ”

“ There are more kinds of luxury than those which mere wealth can bring, and there are kinds of want as many—luxury is a state of abundance, whether of wealth, or books, or intellect, or privileges beyond our personal need. Want is a state of poverty of clothes, or food, or of physical or mental necessities of whatever sort. It is a fact that one half of the world possesses that which the other half needs. The poor need the assistance of the rich in matters of physical comforts and counsel. ”

“ But works of art, like the precious stones and metals, have come to be the conventionally accepted standards of luxury, the everywhere recognised insignia of the aristocracy of wealth. So I have them, and add to my collection steadily just as I add to my collection of finely bound books that no one ever opens. What slaves of convention and ostentation we are!
“What’s become of the Corot that used to hang there?” I asked, suspiciously, because I had had so many experiences of my family’s trifling with my possessions. ”

“ This hoarding of wealth, this craving for it, is only another form of luxury, the luxury of growing rich. Some like to be thought rich, and called rich, and treated with a fawning respect on account of their riches; others love to hide their riches, but to hug their money in secret, and seem to enjoy the prospect of dying rich. I was engaged in a singular case some time ago, in which an old lady who had starved herself to death, and lived in the greatest squalor, had secreted £250 in a stocking under the mattress of her bed. ”

“ The growth of wealth and of luxury, wicked, wasteful and wanton, as before God I declare that luxury to be, has been matched step by step by a deepening and deadening poverty, which has left whole neighborhoods of people practically without hope and without aspiration.—Bishop Potter. ”

“ The home of a free and enterprising race endowed with rare gifts of intellect and sensibility, and ever on the alert for improvement, it became the nurse of letters and of arts, while the luxury begotten of prosperity awakened a taste for adornment, and the wealth acquired by an extended commerce furnished the means of gratifying it. ”

“ Wealth flowed into his kingdom from all the surrounding countries, consequently, luxury, with its never-failing associate, debauchery, made its appearance, and the decadence of this mighty kingdom set in. ”

“ But so far as wealth and luxury transcend comfort and competence, and possess those peculiar qualities which are held to render them enviable, what they appeal to, and what they are measured by, is not their effect upon the senses, but their appeal to the imagination and the mind. We can easily see this by considering very simple examples, which will show us that the {359} same external things are luxuries or not luxuries according to the way in which the mind regards them. ”

“ Wealth—constituted authority—softness and ease and luxury. I'll teach you what softness is! You'll know what a heaven a hard bed can be, after a day in the wind off Bering Straits. You'll find out what luxury is, too. ”

“ It would be luxury for a student to own two coats, if he must go without a dictionary to buy the second.
It is easy to settle the luxuries of others, but less easy to so define luxury that the public can agree in the definition. ”

“ Every luxury to be purchased by wealth was described as being there: all the appearances of household indulgence generally found amongst the most self-indulgent of the rich were crowded into this abode. ”

“ Indeed, it is a melancholy fact, that so long as agriculture is but partially attended to, and in a manner neglected, for the more speedy acquisition of wealth, the progress of luxury necessarily tends to change the most virtuous habits, and to vitiate the morals of a mercantile nation. ”

“ It is upon this last point that the opponents of luxury lay the greatest emphasis. As the quantity of existing wealth is insufficient to satisfy even the primal wants of the large majority of our fellow-creatures, we should endeavor to increase this available store as much as we can, and should refrain from drawing upon it in a reckless manner in order to gratify superfluous wants. ”

“ Secondly, another of the chief pleasures procured by wealth,—vanity, the desire to astonish, to make a display before others,—cannot be gratified in the country for the same reason: its inhabitants being too scattered. There is no one in the country to appreciate luxury; there is no one to astonish. ”

“ And all at once the wealth displayed in the Countess de Restaud’s drawing-room rose before his eyes. That was the luxury which Goriot’s daughter had loved too well, the gilding, the ostentatious splendor, the unintelligent luxury of the parvenu, the riotous extravagance of a courtesan. Then the attractive vision suddenly went under an eclipse as he remembered the stately grandeur of the Hotel de Beauseant. As his fancy wandered among these lofty regions in the great world of Paris, innumerable dark thoughts gathered in his heart; his ideas widened, and his conscience grew more elastic. ”

“ The influx of extraneous wealth, producing such increase of population, and such extent of luxury, and when these arrive at a certain point, other countries, other markets, successfully compete, and eventually surpass. ”

“ Wealth, I said, and poverty; the one is the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent. ”

“ My dear boy, don’t you see we are up against a situation that calls on us to bluff to the limit, or lay down? In such a case, luxury becomes a duty, and lavishness the truest economy. Not to spend is to go broke. ”

“ So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. ”

“ Luxury, so far as it reaches the poor, will do good to the race of people; it will strengthen and multiply them. Sir, no nation was ever hurt by luxury; for, as I said before, it can reach but to a very few. ”

“ The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarce capable of cure. ”

“ The luxury, the pampered state, the idleness—if you please, the wickedness—of the rich, all contribute to the support, the comfort, and employment of the poor. You may behold extravagance, it is a vice; but that very extravagance circulates money, and the vice of one contributes to the happiness of many. ”

“ The consumption of the proprietor has been styled luxury, in opposition to useful consumption. From what has just been said, we see that great luxury can prevail in a nation which is not rich,—that poverty even increases with luxury, and vice versâ. ”

“ Commercial Prosperityand ruffs, the court gallant with his dyed beard and huge breeches, the idle apprentices quick to riot, the poor poets in prison for debt—these and how many more are familiar to every reader of the Elizabethan drama. As often in periods of commercial prosperity, luxury became fantastic. Men sold their acres to put costly garments on their backs. ”

“ She was dressed with a richness and surrounded with a comfort that her straitened means made a marvel. To prevent economy from becoming meanness, and to keep luxury this side of extravagance, were her constant, almost her only, employments. ”

“ Some idea of its splendor has already been given—and, it is here that we shall find that height of luxury which is the opposite of that depth of poverty and physical wretchedness that we have just now been contemplating. ”

“ I want Dinky-Dunk all to myself. And the freedom of isolation like this is such a luxury! To be just one's self, in civilization, is a luxury, is the [Pg 42] greatest luxury in the world,—and also the most expensive, I've found to my sorrow. ”

“ In this sense, luxury is a necessary concomitant of property, without which no society can exist, and of a great inequality in fortunes, which is the result, not of the right of property, but of bad laws. ”

“ We must add also to this parasitic class those who are engaged in luxury trades—with the caveat that it is exceedingly difficult to draw a strict frontier line between necessity and luxury on the one hand, and on the other, between luxury and the thing that may minister to the legitimate comfort, the health, the beauty and the general enrichment of life. ”

“ But he had lived too long in the atmosphere of luxury, and too close to the master adventurers of that speculative day. Luxury had become a second nature to him; contact with men who could sell him out twenty times over had brought him the parching hunger for money. ”

“ As a race we are a prosperous people, and money-making is our first preoccupation. Luxuries are easily within our grasp; cheap luxuries, perhaps, which is all the worse, for that very cheapness is a snare blinding us to the fact that what we indulge in is a luxury. ”

“ Moderation, simplicity, frugality for our private and personal wants; splendid profusion, noble lavishness, beautiful luxury for that common life which now languishes because so few recognise its needs. ”

“ Luxury has as many and as bewitching charms on your side of the ocean as on this; and luxury, wherever she goes, effaces from human nature the image of the Divinity. If I had power I would forever banish and exclude from America all gold, silver, precious stones, alabaster, marble, silk, velvet, and lace. ”

“ You won't be rich, for my house is my only luxury. All the rest, as you know, is on an economical scale. But you will have enough, especially later on; and Lot appears to make a good bit. Oh, it's not money that matters to him, child: what matters to him is ... ”

“ It has not been the gold, but the getting of the gold, that has caught the imaginations of our captains of industry. Their real enjoyment lay not in the luxuries which wealth brought, but in the work of construction and in the place which society awarded them. ”

“ It is the taste for luxury which in our day, in the absence of religious principles, sustains the social movement and reveals to the lower classes their dignity. The Academy of Moral and Political Sciences clearly understood this when it chose luxury as the subject of one of its essays, and I applaud its wisdom from the bottom of my heart. ”