Poor Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Poor people's memory is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in space because they seldom leave the place where they live, and fewer reference points in time…Of course, there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labour, it forgets sooner under the weight of fatigue.

The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree,
Sing all a green willow;
Her hand on her bosom, her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow.

William Shakespeare

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts.

Arthur Conan Doyle

There is little favorable to be said about poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship. Many people will appear to befriend you when you are wealthy, but precious few will do the same when you are poor. If wealth is a magnet, poverty is a kind of repellent. Yet, poverty often brings out the true generosity in others.

Mrs. Elvsted: You have some hidden motive in this, Hedda!
Hedda: Yes, I have. I want for once in my life to have power to mold a human destiny.
Mrs. Elvsted: Have you not the power?
Hedda: I have not—and never had it.
Mrs. Elvsted: Not your husband's?
Hedda: Do you think it's worth the trouble? Oh, if only you could understand how poor I am. And fate has made you so rich!

O world! world! world! thus is the poor agent despised.

William Shakespeare

I've never seen the poor people being so familiar with their head of state as they were with her. It was a beautiful lesson for me.

You ask whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not such a fool as that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the things they call love, I have what is better - the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catallus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of anyone else I have read.

As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing themselves from the poor.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

God said, I am tired of kings,
I suffer them no more;
Up to my ear the morning brings
The outrage of the poor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The poor ego... serves three severe masters and does what it can to bring their claims and demands into harmony with one another. No wonder that the ego so often fails in its task. Its three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

G. K. Chesterton

Let him who loves, where love success may find,
Spread all his sails before the prosperous wind;
But let poor youths who female scorn endure,
And hopeless burn, repair to me for cure.

I have always said that if Great Britain were defeated in war I hoped we should find a Hitler to lead us back to our rightful position among the nations. I am sorry, however, that he has not been mellowed by the great success that has attended him. The whole world would rejoice to see the Hitler of peace and tolerance, and nothing would adorn his name in world history so much as acts of magnanimity and of mercy and of pity to the forlorn and friendless, to the weak and poor. … Let this great man search his own heart and conscience before he accuses anyone of being a warmonger.

Winston Churchill

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.

Those who either from imprudence or want of sagacity avoid doing so, are always overwhelmed with servitude and poverty; for faithful servants are always servants, and honest men are always poor; nor do any ever escape from servitude but the bold and faithless, or from poverty, but the rapacious and fraudulent.

Niccolò Machiavelli

It never was our guise to slight the poor, or aught humane despise.

Friends, the soil is poor, we must sow seeds in plenty for us to garner even modest harvests.

If a thief helps a poor man out of the spoils of his thieving, we must not call that charity.

Dante Alighieri

Our interests and our conscience compel us to act on behalf of those who long for freedom. And we must be a source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the victims of prejudice.

To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

Thus my learning is not my own; it belongs to the unlearned and is the debt I owe themMy wisdom belongs to the foolish, my power to the oppressed. Thus my wealth belongs to the poor, my righteousness to the sinners.

The failure in public and in private life thus to treat each man on his own merits, the recognition of this government as being either for the poor as such or for the rich as such, would prove fatal to our Republic, as such failure and such recognition have always proved fatal in the past to other republics. A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section, it departs from the old American ideal.

Theodore Roosevelt

Men of intellectual and moral eminence who encourage public disobedience of the law are responsible for the acts of those who inevitably follow their counsel: the poor, the ignorant and the impressionable. For example, to the professor objecting to de facto segregation, it may be crystal clear where civil disobedience may begin and where it must end. But the boundaries have become fluid to his students and other listeners. Today in the urban slums, the limits of responsible action are all but invisible.