A bank is a confidence trick. If you put up the right signs, the wizards of finance themselves will come in and ask you to take their money.

Old age and youth cannot live together.

Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable, would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my old cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.

All new money is made through the shifting of social classes and the dispossession of old classes.

And gold has no name, it licks the hand of anyone who has it: good dog!

The City is a machine miraculously organised for extracting gold from the seas, airs, clouds, from barren lands, holds of ships, mines, plantations, cottage hearth-stones, trees and rocks; and he, wretchedly waiting in the exterior halls, could not even get his finger on one tiny, tiny lever.

Loneliness is a terrible blindness.