Wealth & Money Quote by Salvador Dali

Dali doesn’t just confess greed here; he performs it. “Liking money like I like it” lands as a provocation wrapped in piety, elevating cash from mere currency into an object of reverence. Calling it “mysticism” is the key turn: he borrows the language of ecstatic religion to describe a very worldly appetite, collapsing the distance between spiritual longing and material desire. The subtext isn’t “I’m rich and I enjoy it.” It’s “your moral categories are flimsy, and I’m going to repaint them in gold leaf.”

Coming from an artist who turned himself into a living brand, the line reads like a manifesto for the 20th-century celebrity-creator. Dali understood earlier than most that the artwork wasn’t only on the canvas; it was in the persona, the spectacle, the scandal. Money becomes “glory” not because it’s virtuous, but because it radiates: it attracts attention, grants permission, amplifies myth. In that sense, he treats wealth as an aesthetic medium, a kind of spotlight you can sculpt with.

The intent is also defensive. Dali was criticized for commercialism and for courting patrons and publicity with almost cartoonish enthusiasm. By making money sacred, he dodges the old romantic script where the “real” artist must be pure, suffering, above commerce. He flips the accusation into a creed: if art is about desire, illusion, and fetish, then worshipping money isn’t a betrayal of surrealism. It’s a surrealism of modern life, where the miracle is the marketplace.