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Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

— Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)

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Poverty

More quotes by Charlotte Brontë

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Jane Eyre (1847)

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

Jane Eyre (1847)

Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

The Professor (1857)

There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.

Villette (1853)

If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.

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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

It is better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be stupid and speak lies.

Solomon

If a poor person envies a rich person, he is no better than the rich person.

Leo Tolstoy

The poor, by thinking unceasingly of money, reach the point of losing the spiritual advantages of non-possession, thereby sinking as low as the rich.

Emil Cioran The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

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