Avarice Quotes - Page 6

• Those whose days are consumed in the low pursuits of avarice, or the gaudy frivolties of fashion, unobservant of nature's lovelinessof demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie.

  Aristotle

  Fashion, Nature, Lying

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• By multiplying the means of gratification, by promoting the introduction and circulation of the precious metals, those darling objects of human avarice and enterprise, it serves to vivify and invigorate the channels of industry, and to make them flow with greater activity and copiousness. The assiduous merchant, the laborious husbandman, the active mechanic, and the industrious manufacturer,-all orders of men, look forward with eager expectation and growing alacrity to this pleasing reward of their toils.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Mean, Men, Order

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2015). “The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution”, p.58, Coventry House Publishing

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• Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Happiness, Mistake, Ambition

  Charles Caleb Colton (1823). “Remarks on the Talents of Lord Byron and the Tendencies of Don Juan”, p.84

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• While one may lose much because of avarice, nothing was ever accomplished by abstinence.

  Isuna Hasekura

  May, Abstinence, Accomplished

  Isuna Hasekura (2016). “Spice and Wolf, Vol. 1 (light novel)”, p.70, Hachette UK

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• Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Self, Mercy, States

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Late President of the United States”, p.205

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• The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

  Federico Garcia Lorca

  Running, Wall, Believe

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• Purposeless activity may be a phase of death.

  Pearl S. Buck

  Greed, Phases, May

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• The avarice of mankind is insatiable; at one time two obols was pay enough; but now, when this sum has become customary, men always want more and more without end.

  Aristotle

  Men, Two, Want

  Aristotle (2016). “Politics”, p.58, Aristotle

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• At length corruption, like a general flood (So long by watchful ministers withstood), Shall deluge all; and avarice, creeping on, Spread like a low-born mist, and blot the sun.

  Alexander Pope

  Long, Sun, Corruption

  Alexander Pope (1856). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope”, p.26

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• All earthly joy begins pleasantly, but at the end it gnaws and kills.

  Thomas a Kempis

  Greed, Joy, Materialism

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• It's a cultural disability in America that we worship pleasure, leisure, and affluence. I think the church is doubly damned when they use Jesus as a vehicle for achieving all of that. Like, if you give a tithe, He'll make you rich. Why? Are you hacking Him off or something? If you give a tithe, you get rid of ten percent of the root of all evil. You should be giving ninety percent. Cause God can handle money better than we can.

  Rich Mullins

  Jesus, Thinking, Roots

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• Gaming is a vice the more dangerous as it is deceitful; and, contrary to every other species of luxury, flatters its votaries with the hopes of increasing their wealth; so that avarice itself is so far from securing us against its temptations that it often betrays the more thoughtless and giddy part of mankind into them.

  Henry Fielding

  Gambling, Luxury, Temptation

  Henry Fielding (1988). “An Enquiry Into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers and Related Writings”, p.92, Wesleyan University Press

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• Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by its avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus, in pulling Society down it pulls itself down. Its ultimate collapse is usually occasioned by a disastrous war, but preceding that event is a history of increasing and discouraging levies on the marketplace, causing a decline in the aspirations, hopes, and self-esteem of its victims.

  Frank Chodorov

  War, Self Esteem, Events

  Frank Chodorov (2007). “Rise and Fall of Society”, p.150, Ludwig von Mises Institute

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• The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of Spain,- sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man.

  Francis Parkman

  Strong, Ambition, Passion

  Francis Parkman (1927). “The Works of Francis Parkman”

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• Yet avarice is numbered among the sins, but stupidity omitted.

  E. B. Farnum

  Stupidity, Avarice Greed, Sin

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• When America was first made known to Europe, the part assumed by France on the borders of that new world was peculiar, and is little recognized. While the Spaniard roamed sea and land, burning for achievement, red-hot with bigotry and avarice, and while England, with soberer steps and a less dazzling result, followed in the path of discovery and gold-hunting, it was from France that those barbarous shores first learned to serve the ends of peaceful commercial industry.

  Francis Parkman

  Hunting, Discovery, Europe

  Francis Parkman, David Levin (1983). “France and England in North America: Pioneers of France in the New World. The Jesuits of North America in the seventeenth century. La Salle and the discovery of the Great West. The old régime in Canada”, p.145, Library of America

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• In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics...For as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

  Polybius

  Children, War, Men

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• Five great enemies of peace inhabit us: avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Ambition, Pride, Envy

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• Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive... To invent your own life's meaning is not easy, but it's still allowed, and I think you'll be happier for the trouble.

  Bill Watterson

  Good Life, Thinking, Creating

  "Some thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled". Bill Watterson's commencement speech at the Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, www.graduationwisdom.com. May 20, 1990.

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• Gluttony should be destroyed by self-control; unchastity by desire for God and longing for the blessings held in store; avarice by compassion for the poor; anger by goodwill and love for all men; worldly dejection by spiritual joy; listlessness by patience, perseverance and offering thanks to God; self-esteem by doing good in secret and by praying constantly with a contrite heart; and pride by not judging or despising anyone in the manner of the boastful Pharisee (cf. Lk. 18:11-12), and by considering oneself the least of all men.

  John of Damascus

  Christian, Spiritual, Perseverance

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• Frugality is one thing, avarice another.

  Horace

  Frugality, One Thing

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• Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.

  Edmund Burke

  Ambition, Vanity, Sin

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• A big man is always accused of gluttony, whereas a wizened or osseous man can eat like a refugee at every meal, and no one ever notices his greed.

  Robertson Davies

  Men, Greed, Meals

  Robertson Davies (1949). “The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks”, Clarke, Irwin

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• avarice is especially, I suppose, a disease of the imagination.

  Sara Coleridge

  Imagination, Greed, Disease

  Sara Coleridge Coleridge (1873). “Memoir and Letters of Sara Coleridge”, p.131

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• Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches; and tho' avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Greed, Poor

  "The Thomas Paine Collection: Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, An Essay on Dream, Biblical Blasphemy, Examination Of The Prophecies".

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