Quotes: Water. Wealth. Weapons. Weather.

Water
Water can create beautiful forms and strip the flesh to bones when cast up by the sea.
Water 11 It [water] can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snow flake, or strip the living to a single shining bone cast up by the sea. Eiseley, The Immense Journey

Wealth
Wealth needs to be regulated by the state and excessive possessions must be given up to the state.
Wealth 37 But trade and industry will be regulated by the guardians to prevent excessive individual wealth or poverty; anyone acquiring more than four times the average possession of the citizens must relinquish the excess to the state. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Plato.

Wealth is like muck, useless unless it is spread. [Hello, Dolly.]
Wealth 118 F. Bacon: Money is like muck, not good unless it is spread. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, Francis Bacon.

If you want to know what God thinks of money, look at those who have it.
Wealth 80 Dorothy Parker, quoting Maurice Baring: If you want to know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom he gives it. Cowley, ed., Writers at Work.

Wealth is in the tools that extend the range of human endeavor.
Wealth 990 Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out; in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of clothes, so to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to burn; in a good double-wick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a locomotive to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving...by tools and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers, as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the day, and knowledge, and good will. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Wealth.

We honor the wealthy because they have the independence that all of us should have.
Wealth 239 We honor the rich because they have externally the freedom, power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. Emerson, History.

People laugh at rich men’s jokes but would not laugh if they were not rich.
Wealth 8 …as every rich man has usually some sly way of jesting, which would make no great figure were he not a rich man. Steele, 3/2/1711. The Spectator.

He is rich who benefits from the labors of others in his country and from different countries and times.
Wealth and Learning 991 He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, of men in distant countries and in past times. Emerson, The Conduct of Life: Wealth.


Weapons
One man with a pistol is more powerful than one hundred who are unarmed because each of the one hundred fears to be the one hit by the bullet.
Weapons 170 The sapient Partridge says, that one man with a pistol is equal to a hundred unarmed, because, though he can shoot but one of the multitude, yet no one knows but that he himself may be that luckless individual. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley.

Weather
Noting the snow, he commented on the foolishness of not staying comfortably at home in such conditions.
Weather 113 Mr. John Knightley: Actually snowing at this moment!--the folly of not allowing people to be comfortable at home--and the folly of people’s not staying comfortably at home when they can! Austen, Emma

Why quit the tranquility and independence of one’s fireplace to go out into the sleety rain of April?
Weather 303 Mr. John Knightley: Such a man, to quit the tranquility and independence of his own fire-side, and on the evening of a cold sleety April day rush out again into the world. Austen, Emma

People who exert their faculties are superior to all weather conditions.
Weather 202 Johnson: He that shall resolutely excite his faculties, or exert his virtues, will soon make himself superior to the seasons; and may set at defiance the morning mist and the evening damp, the blasts of the east, and the clouds of the south. Boswell, Life of Johnson, Vol. 1.

We need to see the February nor’easter and the soft breezes of June as equal experiences.
Weather 641 …we can never call ourselves regenerated men, till a February northeaster shall be as grateful to us as the softest breeze of June. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance.