Skip to content

Riches are the pettiest and least worthy gifts which God can give a man. What are they to God's word? Yea, to bodily gifts, such as beauty and health, or to the gifts of the mind, such as understanding, skill, wisdom? Yet men toil for them day and night, and take no rest. Therefore our Lord God commonly gives riches to foolish people to whom He gives nothing else.

— Martin Luther

Another quote →

Topics

Money

More quotes by Martin Luther

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent," he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Ninety-five Theses (1517)

Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it.

Through faith we are restored to paradise and created anew.

The Freedom of a Christian (1520)

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

On Marriage (1530)

Religion is not 'doctrinal knowledge,' but wisdom born of personal experience.

All Martin Luther quotes →

You may also like

Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Martin Luther (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.