Avarice Quotes - Page 11

• If you wish to remove avarice you must remove its mother, luxuries.
  [Lat., Avaritiam si tollere vultis, mater ejus est tollenda, luxuries.]

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Mother, Luxury, Wish

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• Be assured that, although men of eminent genius have been guilty of all other vices, none worthy of more than a secondary name has ever been a gamester. Either an excess of avarice or a deficiency of what, in physics, is called excitability, is the cause of it; neither of which can exist in the same bosom with genius, with patriotism, or with virtue.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Men, Names, Gambling

  Walter Savage Landor (1853). “The works of Walter Savage Landor [ed. by J. Forster].”, p.125

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• Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of mankind; none of them surely for our admiration.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Hero, Ambition, Pestilence

  Walter Savage Landor (2016). “Delphi Collected Poetical Works of Walter Savage Landor (Illustrated)”, Delphi Classics

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• An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of avarice.

  Agnes Repplier

  Dream, Appreciation, Thinking

  Agnes Repplier (1893). “Essays in Idleness”, Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin

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• What in the rising man was industry and economy, becomes in the rich man parsimony and avarice.

  Sarah Josepha Hale

  Men, Greed, Rising

  Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1832). “Ladies' Magazine and Literary Gazette”, p.156

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• Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice. A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

  Dorothy L. Sayers

  Work, Thinking, Squirrels

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• We took advantage of [the Indians'] ignorance and inexperience to incline them the more easily toward treachery, lewdness, avarice, and every sort of inhumanity and cruelty, after the example and pattern of our ways.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Ignorance, America, Inexperience

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• I never engaged in public affairs for my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice or ambition, or even the desire of fame

  John Adams

  Jealousy, Ambition, Envy

  John Adams (1854). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.593

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• Instant gratification takes too long.

  Carrie Fisher

  Sarcastic, Women, Humor

  Carrie Fisher (2011). “Postcards From the Edge”, p.58, Simon and Schuster

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• It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have all one wants.

  Blaise Pascal

  Freedom, Greed, Want

  "Pensées".

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• If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us saintly. But since we see that avarice, anger, pride and stupidity commonly profit far beyond charity, modesty, justice and thought, perhaps we must stand fast a little, even at the risk of being heroes.

  Thomas More

  Trust, Betrayal, Hero

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• What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Kings, Pride, Pyramids

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• Possessions are usually diminished by possession.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Greed, Materialism, Possession

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• The man who pets a lion may tame it, but the man who coddles the body makes it ravenous.

  John Climacus

  Men, Greed, Pet

  Saint John (Climacus) (1982). “John Climacus (CWS)”, p.28, Paulist Press

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• Avarice is as destitute of what it has, as poverty of what it has not.

  Publilius Syrus

  Christian, Greed, Poverty

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• Lasting peace is sought, it is essential to adopt international measures to improve the lot of the masses. The welfare of the entire human race must replace hunger and oppression. People of the world must be taught to give up envy, avarice and rancour.

  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

  Giving Up, Race, People

  "I. Milletlerarası Gençlik Kongresi" by Selçuk University, (p. 19), 1988.

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• The man who worships mere wealth is a snob.

  Anthony Trollope

  Men, Worship, Wealth

  Anthony Trollope (2008). “Thackeray: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition”, p.127, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• But the conceit of one's self and the conceit of one's hobby are hardly more prolific of eccentricity than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dispositions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy all the calculations of reason, and reach the miraculous in subtlety.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Self, Hobbies, Peculiar

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.47

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• Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's.

  William Hazlitt

  Dream, Fame, Poet

  William Hazlitt, Edward George Earle Lytten Butwer-Lytton Lyton (1st baron), Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd (1836). “Essays: On self-love. On the conduct of life: or, Advice to a school-boy. On the fine arts. The fight. On want of money. On the feeling of immortality in youth. The main-chance. The opera. Of persons one would wish to have seen. My first acquaintance with poets. The shyness of scholors. The Vatican. On the spirit of monarchy”, p.293

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• [On Christianity:] Its lip-service and its empty rites have made it the easiest of all tasks for the usurer to cloak his cruelties, the miser to hide his avarice, the lawyer to condone his lies, the sinner of all social sins to purchase the social immunity from them by outward deference to churches.

  Ouida

  Lying, Hypocrisy, Religion

  Ouida (1896). “Views and Opinions”

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• Avarice, with all its black attendants, is confessedly a crime of old age, and seldom arrives at maturity till accompanied with gray hairs.

  Mary Collyer

  Maturity, Hair, Greed

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• There is only one vice, which may be found in life with as strong features, and as high a colouring as needs be employed by any satyrist or comic poet; and that is AVARICE.

  David Hume

  Strong, Color, Vices

  David Hume (2016). “Delphi Complete Works of David Hume (Illustrated)”, p.923, Delphi Classics

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• My friends are my estate. Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them. They tell me those who were poor early have different views of gold. I don't know how that is. God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him.

  Emily Dickinson

  Views, Giving, Forgive Me

  Emily Dickinson (1959). “Selected poems and letters of Emily Dickinson: together with Thomas Wentworth Higginson's account of his correspondence with the poet and his visit to her in Amherst”, Turtleback

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• In youth, we clothe ourselves with rainbows, with hope & love, & go as brave as the zodiack. In age we put out another sort of perspiration; gout, fever, rheumatism, caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Rainbow, Brave, Doubt

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1975). “Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks: 1848-1851”, p.168, Harvard University Press

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• The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritualcreation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Money, Animal, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1866). “The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations”, p.362

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