Tao Te Ching
Money
Like most situations, actions, people, and objects; money isn't "good" or "bad" in itself—everything depends on context. Money is a powerful and useful symbol but a destructive deity as it has become in most places and times. One of the 4 Worldly Dharmas—along with Fame, Pleasure, and Power—money and wealth easily becomes an addictive and powerful influence over our lives and decisions. The less thoughtful make choices based on short-term over long-term results; the more strategic and aware make the more mid- and long-range choices; but still, the materialistic approach to money prevails reeking havoc in its wake. How many leaders, countries, movements, civilizations, and everyday people have crashed into corruption, ignominy, and suffering by following the siren-calls of money-seeking? Of course, we need some form of money and wealth to survive and most-often need to make some kind of Faustian compromise in order to secure it. The main choice may only be how much we’re willing to give up and with how much self-awareness we can maintain in the process. Closely linked to the Desire defined by the Buddha as the cause of Suffering, our experience of and relationship to Money and Wealth is ignored only at our great peril.
Quotes (85)
“Some wicked men are rich, some good are poor,
We will not change our virtue for their store:
Virtue's a thing that none can take away;
But money changes owners all the day.”
“having a lot of things, a lot of money: shameless thieves. Surely their way isn't the way.”
“Aren't you ashamed to care so much to make all the money you can, and to advance your reputation and prestige -while for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your soul you have no care or worry?”
“If unjustly gained, the love of money is impious; and if justly, shameful. It is unseemly to be merely parsimonious even with justice on one's side.”
“When men are enlightened enough to follow their natural instincts, they will have no need of law-courts or police, will have no temples and no public worship, and use no money.”
“There is nothing more honorable or noble than indifference to money. There is nothing so characteristic of narrowness and littleness of soul than the love of riches.”
“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.”
“a wife and dower, credit and friends, even birth and beauty, are all the gifts of Queen Money.”
“Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.”
“The irritations of amassing, protecting, and losing money easily become an endless anguish.”
“Should Heaven rain pearls, the cold cannot wear them as clothes;
Should Heaven rain jade, the hungry cannot use it as food.”
“Aren't you ashamed to care so much to make all the money you can, and to advance your reputation and prestige—while for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your soul you have no care or worry?”
“The Emperor's Mint and the way it is wrought is such that you might say the he has the Secret of Alchemy in perfection, and you would be right. For he makes his money after this fashion.”
“If a man has desires but cannot satisfy them, or has money but does not use it, he is exactly the same as a poor man... When it comes to this point, there is no difference between poverty and wealth.”
“Nor can they understand why a totally useless substance like gold should now, all over the world, be considered far more important than human beings, who gave it such value as it has, purely for their own convenience.”
“Of great riches there is no real use, except in the distribution; the rest is but conceit... money is like muck, not good except it be spread.”
“Throwing your whole life away, sacrificed to the thirst for gold... But when you saw your life was through, all your money was no use”
“Those who know the true use of money, and regulate the measure of wealth according to their needs, live contented with few things.”
“Don't think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.”
“I have never seen the Philosopher’s Stone that turns lead into Gold, but I have known the pursuit of it turn a Man’s Gold into Lead.”
“A great stock, though with small profits, generally increases faster than a small stock with great profits. Money, says the proverb, makes money. When you have a little, it is often easier to get more. The great difficulty is to get that little.”
“The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no fatherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.”
“Labor does not have to ask the patronage of capital, but capital solicits the air of labor... If you divorce capital from labor, capital is hoarded, and labor starves.”
“Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.”
“Wealth is nowhere more at home than in the merchant class because merchants look upon money only as a means of further gain, just as a workman regards his tools so they try to preserve and increase it by using it.”
“I’d need rest to refresh my brain, and to get rest it’s necessary to travel, and to travel one must have money, and in order to get money you have to work. . . . I am in a vicious circle . . .from which it is impossible to escape.”
“Clever though be the many thoughts expressed by mouth or pen about the invention of money and its enormous value as a civilizer, against such praises should be set the curse to which it has always been doomed in song and legend... gold here figures as the demon strangling manhood's innocence... the goblin's game of paper money.”
“Money has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper.”
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”
“Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities…. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange…. The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”
“What Egyptian worship of garlic or crocodile was ever so damnable as the modern worship of money?”
“In business, the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magican's serpent, remaining today sole master... saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration”
“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal—that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
“Money is the symbol of duty, it is the sacrament of having done for mankind that which mankind wanted. Mankind may not be a very good judge, but there is no better.”
“Though wisdom cannot be gotten for gold, still less can it be gotten without it... gold lies at the root of wisdom”
“The means employed by the lust for power have changed, but the same volcano continues to glow... what one formerly did 'for the sake of God' one now does for the sake of money—that which now gives the highest feeling of power and good conscience.”
“The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization... the most important thing in our world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness.”
“Instead of sympathizing with the poor and abolishing the rich, we must ruthlessly abolish the poor by raising their standard of life... Lack of money is the root of all evil... What is the matter with the poor is Poverty: what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”
“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident… they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”
“Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie.”
“I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”
“The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future.”
“To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough, and then no money or a little money or less money or more money, but money, always money, and if you have money or you don't have money it is the money that counts and money makes money, but what makes money make money?”
“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are over consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
“The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we've forgotten there’s any other way.”
“Her voice was full of money... that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it... the king's daughter, the golden girl”
“You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.”
“Without money, you can't be straightforward in your dealings with women. For without money, you can't pick and choose, you've got to take what women you can get; and then, necessarily, you've got to break free of them. Constancy, like all other virtues, has got to be paid for in money... Marriage is only a trap set for you by the money-god. You grab the bait; snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some 'good' job... And what a life! Licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra. Pram-pushing and sneaky adulteries. And the wife finding you out and breaking the cut-glass whisky decanter over your head.”
“What is it that happens in an inflation? The unit of money suddenly loses its identity.”
“To try to extinguish the drive for riches with money is like trying to quench a fire by pouring butter over it.”
“The point is we both know life and understand death—and both believe treatment in hell and everywhere else depends on money.”
“Money is emptiness, money is not different from emptiness, neither is emptiness different from money, indeed, emptiness is money.”
“'Selling our souls to the devil' is just a dramatic way of saying 'trading our time for money.'”
“A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
“Man sacrifices his health in order to make money Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.”
“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.”
“If we are passionate, if we are in love or in a lustful state, we begin to feel that there is an enormous amount of glue sprayed all over the world… We want to be stuck to things, to objects, wealth, money, friends… so we begin to spray this crude glue all over the place. We are asking to be stuck.”
“Let me ask you one question,
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness?
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.”
“The best thing you can buy with money is freedom, time. I don't know how much I earn a year. I have no idea.”
“The magic touch, that special spark needed to create a successful business... spend your money for the things that money can buy, don't worry about profit or loss, and save your energy for the things that money can't buy.”
“Money, the most influential god in America—untouchable asshole but his stock never falls.”
“Out of college, money spent
See no future, pay no rent
All the money's gone...
Nowhere to go, nowhere to go.”
“Success isn't about how much money you make, it's about the difference you make in people's lives”
“The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need”
“Money is an abstraction of tangible resources or human effort... an abstraction, it has no 'real' value to our primitive brains.”
“the dollar bill is universally venerated across all political and religious divides. though it has no intrinsic value, trust in the dollar is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords, and North Korean tyrants.”
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