Skip to content

[To usurers] You draw money from tears, you choke those who have remained naked and strike those who are hungry.

— Basil of Caesarea

[Agli usurai] Tu trai denaro dalle lacrime, tu strozzi chi è rimasto nudo e percuoti chi ha fame.

Original text (Italian)

Another quote →

Notes from Wikiquote

Quoted in Enrico Pepe, Martiri e santi del calendario romano, Città Nuova Editrice, Roma, 2002.

Topics

Money

More quotes by Basil of Caesarea

When the mind is not dissipated upon extraneous things, nor diffused over the world about us through the senses, it withdraws within itself, and of its own accord ascends to the contemplation of God.

We thus become temples of God whenever earthly cares cease to interrupt the continuity of our memory of Him.

For the hopes of men have been justly called waking dreams.

You must give heed unto virtue, O men, which swims forth even with a man who has suffered shipwreck, and, on his coming naked to land, will render him more honoured than the happy Phaeacians.

The earth doth not cover our beloved, but heaven hath received him; let us tarry for a while, and we shall be in his company.

All Basil of Caesarea quotes →

You may also like

Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Basil of Caesarea (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.