
“The safest wealth is the poverty of needs.”
Der sicherste Reichtum ist die Armut an Bedürfnissen.
Zwischen oben und unten (1946), p. 315
As reported by Charles Simmons in A Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker, containing over a thousand subjects alphabetically and systematically arranged (North Wrentham, Mass. 1852), p. 103 http://books.google.de/books?id=YOAyAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA103&dq=socrates. However, the original source of this statement is unknown.
Cf. Joseph Addison in The Spectator No. 574 Friday, July 30, 1714, p. 655 http://books.google.de/books?id=K1cdAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA655&dq=socrates: In short, content is equivalent to wealth, and luxury to poverty; or, to give the thought a more agreeable turn, "content is natural wealth," says Socrates: to which I shall add, "luxury is artificial poverty.".
Attributed
“The safest wealth is the poverty of needs.”
Der sicherste Reichtum ist die Armut an Bedürfnissen.
Zwischen oben und unten (1946), p. 315
“… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention…”
Simon, H. A. (1971) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" in: Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore. MD: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 40–41.
1960s-1970s
Context: In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
“Contentment is the only real wealth”
“If either wealth or poverty are come by honesty, there is no shame.”
“All this [wealth] excludes but one evil,—poverty.”
1777
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Life of Johnson (Boswell)
“Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”
Source: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror
“Well governed, poverty, ill governed, wealth a disgrace.”
The Ethics of Confucius https://books.google.ca/books?id=dYfFFik3e0YC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false, Cosimo Inc, 2005, p. 318 of Index under "People, the Nourishment of".
:Variation: To be wealthy in an unjust society is a disgrace.
Attributed
“Wealth and poverty do not lie in a person's estate, but in their souls.”
iv. 34
From Symposium by Xenophon
“Wealth brings a heavy purse; poverty, a light spirit.”
Source: Path of Life (1909), p. 88