If you make money your god, it will plague you like the devil.

(Other Authors and Sources)

English proverb

Sometimes "'twill plague you".

An anonymous proverb, recorded in Thomas Fielding, ed., Select Proverbs of All Nations (1824). Thomas Fielding was the pseudonym of John Wade (1788-1875), a British journalist and author.

Though Fielding was only a compiler of proverbs and aphorisms, the quotation then shows up in a variety of collections later in the 19th Century actually cited to "Fielding," e.g., H. Southgate, ed., Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1862); John Camden Hotten, ed. The Golden Treasury of Thought (1873); Edward Parsons Day, ed., Day's Collacon: an Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations (1884).

In relatively short order, this "Fielding" then became conflated with the more famous English writer Henry Fielding (1707-1754), to whom this quotation is often credited.