Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
Poverty is a divine stepmother who does for youths what their own mothers were unable to do. It introduces them to frugality, to the world and to life.
—Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) French Novelist
The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
Of all the advantages which come to any young man, I believe it to be demonstrably true that poverty is the greatest.
—Josiah Gilbert Holland (1819–81) American Editor, Novelist
It would be nice if the poor were to get even half of the money that is spent in studying them.
—Burton Hillis (William E. Vaughan) (1915–77) American Columnist, Author
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
—Frederick Douglass (1817–95) American Abolitionist, Author, Editor, Diplomat, Political leader
The cure for “materialism” is to have enough for everybody and to spare. When people are sure of having what they need they cease to think about it.
—Henry Ford (1863–1947) American Businessperson, Engineer
The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
The greatest man in history was the poorest.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Lord God, I thank thee that thou hast been pleased to make me a poor and indigent man upon earth. I have neither house nor land nor money to leave behind me.
—Martin Luther (1483–1546) German Protestant Theologian
One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need the money the most, are the ones that never have it.
—Finley Peter Dunne (1867–1936) American Author, Writer, Humorist
Every Night and every Morn
Some to Misery are born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
—William Blake (1757–1827) English Poet, Painter, Printmaker
We have not yet reached the goal but.. we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this nation.
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st American President
With virtue you can’t be entirely poor; without virtue you can’t really be rich.
—Chinese Proverb
Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving.
—O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) (1862–1910) American Writer of Short Stories
The poor are poor because the rich are rich.
—Unknown
Poor is the man who does not know his own intrinsic worth and tends to measure everything by relative value. A man of financial wealth who values himself by his financial net worth is poorer than a poor man who values himself by his intrinsic self worth.
—Sidney Madwed (1926–2013) American Poet, Author
Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are. It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent and ragged.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied … but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.
—John Berger (1926–2017) English Art Critic, Novelist
It would be a considerable consolation to the poor and discontented, could they but see the means whereby the wealth they covet has been acquired, or the misery that it entails.
—Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann (1728–1795) Swiss Philosophical Writer, Naturalist, Physician
Nations like men, can be healthy and happy, though comparatively poor… . Wealth is a means to an end, not the end itself. As a synonym for health and happiness, it has had a fair trial and failed dismally.
—John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English Novelist, Playwright
Empty pockets make empty heads.
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) American Poet, Novelist, Cultural Historian
I am a poor man, but I have this consolation: I am poor by accident, not by design.
—Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) (1818–85) American Humorist, Author, Lecturer
To be shelterless and alone in the open country, hearing the wind moan and watching for day through the whole long weary night; to listen to the falling rain, and crouch for warmth beneath the lee of some old barn or rick, or in the hollow of a tree; are dismal things—but not so dismal as the wandering up and down where shelter is, and beds and sleepers are by thousands; a houseless rejected creature.
—Charles Dickens (1812–70) English Novelist
A poor man resembles a fiddler, whose music, though liked, is not much praised, because he lives by it; while a gentleman performer, though the most wretched scraper alive, throws the audience into rapture.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
If riches are, as Bacon says, the baggage (” impedimenta “) of virtue, impeding its onward progress—poverty is famine in its commissary department, starving it into weakness for the great conflict of life.
—Tryon Edwards (1809–94) American Theologian, Author
Who, being loved, is poor?
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
To a man with an empty stomach food is God.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) Indian Hindu Political leader
What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires—how many aspirations after goodness and truth—how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!
—Walt Whitman (1819–92) American Poet, Essayist, Journalist, American, Poet, Essayist, Journalist
Poverty is the step-mother of genius.
—Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw) (1818–85) American Humorist, Author, Lecturer
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