Still, let me repeat it one more time. Becoming rich does not guarantee happiness. In fact, it is almost certain to impose the opposite condition – if not from the stresses and strains of protecting wealth, then from the guilt that inevitably accompanies its arrival.

Conventional wisdom daunts initiative and offers far too many convenient reasons for inaction, especially for those with a great deal to lose.

Rich enough to buy the only two things apart from health and love worth fussing about in life. Time. And the option of not having to be in any particular place on any particular day doing any particular thing in order to pay the rent or the mortgage.

‘A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and quietly strangled,’ as Sir Barnett Cocks, clerk of the House of Commons, once pointed out.

‘A committee is a group of the unwilling, chosen from the unfit to do the unnecessary.’

Anyone not busy learning is busy dying. For as long as you foster a willingness to learn, you will ward off sclerosis of the brain and hardening of the mental arteries. Curiosity has led many a man and women into the valley of serious wealth.

No matter how much faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is rarely taken.

I began this book with a poem to demonstrate that becoming rich has given me the most precious thing in life. And just what is the most precious thing in life that riches can supply? Easy. For me, it’s Time. Time. Time to read and write poetry if I want to. Or to write a book if it takes my fancy. Time to travel on the slightest whim, to walk in th

As the American critic H. L. Mencken once wrote: ‘The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex – because it puts an unbearable burden on his meagre capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unin