“He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.”
Ecclesiastes, c. 300 BC · Hebrew wisdom literature
Chapter 3
On Money and Enough
“Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me.”
Agur son of Jakeh, c. 600 BC · voice in the Hebrew book of Proverbs
“Who is rich? He who rejoices in his portion.”
Ben Zoma, c. 200 AD · sage of the Mishnah, second century
“He who is satisfied with his lot is rich; he who goes on acting with energy has a firm will.”
Laozi, c. 400 BC · Chinese sage, founder of the Taoist tradition
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”
Seneca, c. 65 AD · Roman Stoic and statesman
“A bird can roost but on one branch; a mouse can drink no more than its fill from a river.”
Chinese proverb, 1859 · traditional saying on sufficiency
“Beware of little expences; a small leak will sink a great ship.”
Benjamin Franklin, 1758 · American printer, writing as Poor Richard
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Charles Dickens, 1850 · English novelist, in the mouth of Mr Micawber
“Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it.”
Jane Austen, 1811 · English novelist, in the voice of Marianne Dashwood
Across 450,000 American survey responses, higher income kept lifting how people rated their lives, but their day to day emotional wellbeing stopped improving above roughly seventy five thousand dollars a year.
Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, 2010 · economists and psychologists, Princeton University
In a national survey and a field study of unexpected windfalls, what predicted greater happiness was not how much people earned but how much of it they spent on somebody other than themselves.
Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton, 2008 · social psychologists, University of British Columbia and Harvard
Surveys of more than six thousand working adults in four countries found that those who spent money to buy back their own time reported greater life satisfaction than those who bought more things.
Ashley Whillans and colleagues, 2017 · behavioral scientists, Harvard Business School
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