Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
Poverty Quotes
Juvenal has the most entries, with Solomon, Shakespeare, Ali and the Nigerian politician Peter Obi after him. The older sourced material is blunt. Shaw’s Major Barbara (1905) calls poverty the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes, and Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) has a line addressed to poetry: “that found’st me poor at first, and keep’st me so.” Mark Twain gets in a joke in 1869, saying that a man is fast rising from affluence to poverty.
Three entries are flagged. “Poverty is the worst kind of violence” is credited to Gandhi as disputed. A passage on love having hands to help others is credited to Augustine, also disputed. “Widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot long endure side by side in a democracy” is credited to Thomas Jefferson and flagged misattributed.
Most quoted on poverty:
It is not poverty so much as pretense that harasses a ruined man.
Content with poverty, my soul I arm;
And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.
There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.
There's no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.
No, madam, 'tis not so well that I am poor, though many of the rich are damned.
As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them of course, but one cannot possibly admire them.
Cheerless poverty has no harder trial than this, that it makes men the subject of ridicule.
The lack of wealth is easily repaired; but the poverty of the soul is irreparable.
His rawbone cheekes, through penurie and pine,
Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dyne.
Chill penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
But to the world no bugbear is so great,
As want of figure and a small estate.