Poor Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

To have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

William Shakespeare

I met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, his cloak was out at the elbows, the water passed through his shoes, - and the stars through his soul.

With those who are willing to join, let us cooperate to reduce the burden of arms, to strengthen the structure of peace, to lift up the poor and the hungry.

His purity was too great, his aspiration too high for this poor, miserable world! His great soul is now only enjoying that for which it was worthy!

Sometimes we are tempted to find excuses and complain, acting as if we could only be happy if a thousand conditions were met...I can say that the most beautiful and natural expressions of joy which I have seen in my life were in poor people who had little to hold on to.

Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is poor faith that needs fair weather for standing firm. That alone is true faith that stands the foulest weather.

Well, in that hit you miss. She'll not be hit With Cupid's arrow. She hath Dian's wit, And, in strong proof of chastity well armed, From Love's weak childish bow she lives unharmed. She will not stay the siege of loving terms, Nor bide th' encounter of assailing eyes, Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold. O, she is rich in beauty; only poor That, when she dies, with dies her store.

William Shakespeare

If it is true that one is poor on account of all the things one wants, the ambitious and the avaricious languish in extreme poverty.

Jean de La Bruyère

There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed or with what difficulties, or ease, it could be reached. Paris was always worth it and you received return for whatever you brought to it. But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

Ernest Hemingway

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.

G. K. Chesterton

So I'll meet 'im later on
At the place where 'e is gone—
Where it's always double drill and no canteen.
'E'll be squattin' on the coals
Givin' drink to poor damned souls,
An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!
Yes, Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the livin' Gawd that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

Rudyard Kipling

This leads to the paradox, that because the disease is only in the poor countries, there is not much investment. For example, there is more money put into baldness drugs, than are put into malaria. Now, baldness, it is a terrible thing [audience laughter] and rich men are afflicted, so that is why that priority is set.

Epitaph on a scolding wife by her husband: Here my poor Bridget's corpse doth lie, she is at rest - and so am I!

Benjamin Franklin

Oh come, please come, to the Poor Mouth Fair
Where the Saints kneel round in their underwear
And say out prayers that most need saying
For needful sinners who've forgotten praying;
And in every alcove and niche you spy
The living dead who envy the long since gone
Who never wished to die.

Look, how my ring encompasseth thy finger,
Even so thy breast encloseth my poor heart;
Wear both of them, for both of them are thine.

William Shakespeare

Each individual Christian and every community is called to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor.

If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would simply be running with the blood of philanthropists.

G. K. Chesterton

For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.

When over long periods of human history I scrutinized the activity of the Jewish people, suddenly there arose up in me the fearful question whether inscrutable Destiny, perhaps for reasons unknown to us poor mortals, did not, with eternal and immutable resolve, desire the final victory of this little nation.

I want to speak to you first of all as regards your duties as boys; and in the next place as regards your duties as men; and the two things hang together. The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and lacks any one of those three traits.

Theodore Roosevelt

War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy.

William Faulkner

Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the toughfibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds of energies in rehabilitation of its poor as long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.