Poverty Quotes

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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 Dunne

To a man with an empty stomach food is God.

Mahatma Gandhi

When poverty comes in the door love flies out the window.

Proverb

Do not ask the name of the person who seeks a bed for the night. He who is reluctant to give his name is the one who most needs shelter.

Victor Hugo

In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.

Confucius

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Virginia Woolf

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

Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.

Henry David Thoreau

The rich become richer and the poor become poorer is a cry heard throughout the whole civilized world.

Friedrich Schiller

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

W. E. B. Du Bois

Poverty consist in feeling poor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A hungry man is not a free man.

Adlai Stevenson

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Empty pockets never held anyone back.  Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.

Norman Vincent Peale

For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

John W. Gardner

Empty pockets make empty heads.

William Carlos Williams

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.

Eli Khamorov

No man can worship God or love his neighbor on an empty stomach.

Woodrow Wilson

Society comprises two classes:  those who have more food than appetite, and those who have more appetite than food.

Nicholas Chamfort

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

Henry Ward Beecher

I am a poor man, but I have this consolation: I am poor by accident, not by design.

Josh Billings

Painless poverty is better than embittered wealth.

Greek Proverb

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

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

George Eliot

Not he who has little, but he who wishes more, is poor.

Seneca

The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.

Samuel Johnson

It is not difficult for the rich to do good deeds.

Chanakya

But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats

Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.

Benjamin Franklin

However mean your life is, meet it and live it:  do not shun it and call it hard names.  Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.  Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends.  Things do not change, we change.  Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

Henry David Thoreau

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