Rags Quotes

• Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

  John Donne

  Love, Time, Months

  'Songs and Sonnets' 'The Sun Rising'

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• There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.

  George Farquhar

  Justice, Scandal, Poverty

  'The Beaux' Stratagem' (1707) act 1, sc. 1

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• Well, that's baseball. Rags to riches one day and riches to rags the next. But I've been in it 36 years and I'm used to it.

  Casey Stengel

  Baseball, Years, One Day

  48 Copy quote

• With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread.

  Thomas Hood

  Inspirational, Red, Heavy

  'The Song of the Shirt' (1843)

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• [Autobiographies] are all the same - it's always rags-to-riches or I-slept-with-so-and-so. Damned if I'm going to say that.

  Deborah Kerr

  Riches, Autobiography, Ifs

  48 Copy quote

• There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals.

  Herman Melville

  Purple, Devil, Democracy

  Herman Melville (2016). “Redburn.His First Voyage”, p.310, Herman Melville

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• Rags will always make their appearance where they have a right to do it.

  Samuel Johnson

  Laziness, Appearance

  Samuel Johnson, James Boswell (1825). “The Table Talk of Dr. Johnson: Comprising Opinions and Anecdotes of Life and Literature, Men, Manners, and Morals”, p.90

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• There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.

  John Ortberg

  Dolls, Treasure, Littles

  64 Copy quote

• Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.

  Charles Dickens

  Purple, Doe, Virtue

  Charles Dickens (2009). “Speeches: Literary and Social: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.13, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests, and hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been human. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality.

  Loren Eiseley

  Dream, Sleep, Reality

  174 Copy quote

• When a child of the streets stands before you in rags, with a tear-stained face, you cannot easily forget him. And yet, you are perplexed what to do. The human soul is difficult to interfere with. You hesitate how far you should go.

  Charles Loring Brace

  Children, Choices, Soul

  50 Copy quote

• The ultimate idea of rags-to-riches success in America is the Hollywood movie star.

  Marin Ireland

  Stars, Ideas, America

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• Unfortunately I have no rags-to-riches story to tell. Money never played a big role for me. My parents just had it.

  Stelios Haji-Ioannou

  Parent, Roles, Stories

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• When you set about your composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limbeck, will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that, I have observed a gardener cut the outward rind of a tree (which is the surtout of it) to make it bear well; and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad.

  Jonathan Swift

  Cutting, Men, Clothes

  Jonathan Swift (1812). “The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, D.D. ...: With Notes, Historical and Critical”, p.73

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• A man will remain a rag-picker as long as he has only the vision of a rag-picker.

  Orison Swett Marden

  Men, Long, Vision

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• The bureaucratic manager, the consuming aesthete, the therapist, the protester and their numerous kindred occupy almost all the available culturally recognizable roles, the notions of the expertise of the few and of the moral agency of everyone are the presuppositions of the dramas which those characters enact. To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Drama, Character, Men

  Alasdair MacIntyre (2013). “After Virtue”, p.298, A&C Black

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• My tears is tatted, my rag in my pocket / Im just looking for love, I know somebody got it

  Jay-Z

  Tears, Pockets, Looking For Love

  7 Copy quote

• Do not permit yourself to fall in love with the end-game play to the exclusion of entire games. It is well to have the whole story of how it happened; the complete play, not the denouement only. Do not embrace the rag-time and vaudeville of chess.

  Emanuel Lasker

  Falling In Love, Games, Play

  6 Copy quote

• Whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe of the dawn.

  Victor Hugo

  Philosophy, Past, Men

  Victor Hugo (1905). “Works: Les misérables; Fantine. Cosette. Marius. Saint-Denis. Jean Valjean”

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• I consider the positions of kings and rulers as that of dust motes. I observe treasures of gold and gems as so many bricks and pebbles. I look upon the finest silken robes as tattered rags. I see myriad worlds of the universe as small seeds of fruit, and the greatest lake on Earth as a drop of oil on my foot.

  Gautama Buddha

  Kings, Lakes, Dust

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• The old doctrine that God wanted man to do something for him, and that he kept a watchful eye upon all the children of men; that he rewarded the virtuous and punished the wicked, is gradually fading from the mind. We know that some of the worst men have what the world calls success. We know that some of the best men lie upon the straw of failure. We know that honesty goes hungry, while larceny sits at the banquet. We know that the vicious have every physical comfort, while the virtuous are often clad in rags.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Children, Honesty, Lying

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The Works of Robert G.Ingersoll. [Dresden Ed.]”

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• My temptation is quiet. Here at life's end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.

  William Butler Yeats

  Life, Truth, Imagination

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.257, Wordsworth Editions

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• Memory is a crazy woman who hoards colored rags and throws away food.

  Austin O'Malley

  Funny, Memories, Crazy

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• Does the sailor then live in exultation of having conquered the waves, or is he humbled by the magnanimity of the ocean? Does the climber believe that he conquered the mountain, or does he dissolve inwardly and face again and again all the times when the mountain was kind to him who was not even a little rag doll in the clutches of a giant? The craving is to merge, to become One with the mountain, the sea, the forest and the universe.

  Zeina

  Believe, Ocean, Sea

  7 Copy quote

• I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion.

  Mark Twain

  Religious, Book, Reading

  Mark Twain, William Dean Howells (1967). “Selected Mark Twain-Howells letters, 1872-1910”

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