Poor people

“ Whatever you may do for the people, the majority will always remain poor and unhappy. Theirs the work, the heavy burden to carry, to endure: all the miseries for the poor, all the pleasures for the rich. ”

“ The mention of the poor brings up to most people’s minds scenes of suffering, want, and misery. The vast number of people who, while poor in money, are rich in life’s good, who live quiet, thoughtful, dignified lives, are forgotten, and the word ‘poor’ means to many the class which we may call degraded. ”

“ Let us see some of the poor people who earn an honest living—well, 'living,' perhaps, is hardly the word—let us say, who can earn enough to pay their rent and keep body and soul together.
Here is a quaint scene, to begin with. When we open the door we start back half choked. The air is full of floating fluff, and some of it gets into our mouths and half chokes us. When we've coughed and wheezed a little we look about us and gradually take in the situation. ”

“ Although living in a state of the most abject poverty, deprived of most of [311] the absolute necessaries of life, and frequently enduring the pangs of protracted starvation, yet these poor people appear happy and contented. ”

“ The poor know nothing of the fashionable part, except the outside splendor; and as they go by the palaces, that poison plant called envy, springs and grows in their poor hearts. The rich know nothing of the poor, except the squalor and rags and wretchedness, and what they read in the police records, and they say, "Thank God, we are not like those people!" ”

“ Let us 'rehouse' the poor by all means, but before we set about the task it is imperatively necessary that we should know what kind of people we are going to build for. Unless this is thoroughly understood, the result of the present agitation will be simply deplorable. ”

“ Were your supposition correct, we should rejoice, but unfortunately, every day brings us scenes of poverty that this work lacks in ability to portray, in sufficient force, the terrible sufferings borne by thousands of our people. In the plenitude of our [184] wealth, we think not of poor, and thus we cannot tell or find out the hundreds of poverty stricken wretches who cover the country. ”

“ If you point out these defects, and endeavour to show how easily they might improve their condition and increase their comforts, you are invariably met by excuses as to their poverty. Are a woman, and her children, and her cabin filthy, whilst a stream of water runs past the door—the answer invariably is, ‘Sure, how can we help it? we are so poor!’ With the man it is the same ”

“ She became the servant of his poor and afflicted people. And since then she may only be met with among them, or on the way to them. That which is given to her, either of money or of clothing, is applied by her to the use of the poor, and she herself lives in voluntary poverty. ”

“ The meaning of that, in plain English, is, that we must find out how far poverty and riches are good or bad for people, and what is the difference between being miserably poor—so as, perhaps, to be driven to crime, or to pass life in suffering—and being blessedly poor, in the sense meant in the Sermon on the Mount. ”

“ A great many of these people are really poor, no doubt; but they have no right thus to force [Pg 192] their poverty and their diseases upon the attention of the public, when other modes, and far better modes, are provided for their relief. ”

“ He would have neither rich people nor beggars. What could flow from such doctrines but discontent and unreasonable expectations among the poor, and a general fear and sense of insecurity among the rich? ”

“ The poor are very well off,at least the agricultural poor, very well off indeed. Their incomes are certain, that is a great point, and they have no cares, no anxieties; they always have a resource, they always have the House. People without cares do not require as much food as those whose life entails anxieties. See how long they live! ”

“ The poor man looks about him at every step he takes, listens suspiciously to every word he hears from the people he meets, every step he takes affords in this way a task for his thoughts and feelings--an occupation. ”

“ But it was impossible to make any impression upon the middling people and the working labouring poor. Their fears were predominant over all their passions, and they threw away their money in a most distracted manner upon those whimsies. ”

“ It is so with the rich, doubtless, and it may be so with the poor who were born in this poverty; but to the well-born and well-educated, to the refined and intellectual, poverty is a dreadful, dreadful thing. ”

“ That one half the world knows not how the other half lives, is a common and just observation;—complaints and murmurs are frequent I find among those of the inhabitants of this highly favoured country, who are not only blessed with the liberty and means of procuring for themselves and their families, the necessaries and comforts, but even many of the luxuries of life!—they complain of poverty, and yet never knew what it was to be really poor! ”

“ The Rich solace themselves in a fancied exemption from the miseries and ignominy which attach to the Poor, though their daily experience of the caprice of fortune ought to teach them, that, while they have the power, it would be wiser to diminish the contrast by ameliorating the condition of Poverty! ”

“ Added to this is their poverty, which makes it necessary for them to accept whatever work with whatever wages they can get. "The destruction of the poor is their poverty," according to the old proverb. ”

“ I do not mean that the rich are obdurate to the sufferings of the poor, but that the artificial condition of the country has choked the ordinary channels of sympathy, and that the latter, when known at all, are known only as the poor. ”

“ The poor should learn more of the cares, responsibilities, unrecorded charities, and absorbing worries of the rich; the rich should learn more intimately the sorrows, privations, struggles, and despair of poverty. ”

“ They seek to excite what they call “the poor” against what they call “the rich”—in this land of great opportunities for all, where, now as ever, so many of the poor of yesterday are among the rich of to-day, and so many of the rich of to-day may be among the poor of to-morrow. ”

“ But the endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society. ”

“ Poor among the poor, destitute among the destitute, beggar among the beggars! The poor man of a great and eternal poverty! The happy and rich poor man, who accepts poverty, who desires poverty, who weds himself to poverty, who chants of poverty! The beggar who gives alms! The naked man who covers the naked! The hungry man who feeds others, the miraculous and supernatural, who changes the men owning false riches into poor men, and poor men into those with real wealth. ”

“ Now, I ask you, friends, should not such work as this be amply sustained? So much more could be accomplished if the funds and sympathy were not so stinted! "The destruction of the poor is their poverty." ”

“ Did I ever tell you this? The poor, they are despised for being poor, and they are let to suffer. Here poverty is not permitted. If a man lose his dwelling by fire, the town builds him another house. You know this. ”

“ The poor feel for the poor, and spare even somewhat from their poverty. Their hearts can tell the pangs of poverty, and pity fills them with love and charity and regret that poverty makes them powerless. But still thou hast a voice. Raise it, and cry shame on those who may, yet will not save the nation from the stain of this deep indignity to woman! ”

“ Enthusiasm glowed in me at the thought, and absorbed in those ambitious dreams I cried: “Thank God for life’s depths, that we may have the glory of outclimbing them.”
And here be it said, we make a mistake when we pity the poor. It is the rich we should pity, those who have never known the joy of poverty, the ecstasy of squeezing the dollar to the last cent. How good the plain fare looks to our hunger! ”

“ But, if you ask them for a small contribution for suffering poverty, you will perhaps be compelled to listen to a long complaint against the improvidence of the poor; their want of industry and economy ”

“ The state of the poor in our country is frightful; and ask any one in the habit of coming in contact with the lower classes, to what is this distress mainly attributable? The answer will always be the same—the improvidence of the poor. ”

“ Meantime I am the only sufferer by my poverty, and am not poor, for no man is so who lives upon his income. Comprends-tu? My dear friend, I have told you what I have told no other person in the world. ”

“ Instead, therefore, of applauding “happy poverty,” which applause is so much the fashion of the present day, I despise the man that is poor and contented; for, such content is a certain proof of a base disposition, a disposition which is the enemy of all industry, all exertion, all love of independence. ”

“ To these causes we must add what comes therefrom [Pg 349] as their joint result: idleness, by which the poor waste their time; thriftlessness and improvidence, by which they lose their opportunities and squander their substance. The poor are seldom so economical as the rich; it is so with children, they spoil the furniture, soil and rend their garments, put things to a wasteful use, consume heedlessly and squander, careless of to-morrow. The poor are the children of society.
To these five causes I must add intemperance, the great bane of the miserable class. ”

“ You who see your betters, bearing up under this shame every day, meekly suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and unpitied, poor, and rather despised for their poverty, do you ever step down from your prosperity and wash the feet of these poor wearied beggars? ”

“ I mean the man, who, when the distant poor
Need help, denies them nothing but his name.
But poverty, with most who whimper forth
Their long complaints, is self-inflicted woe; 430
Th' effect of laziness or sottish waste. ”

“ Those gentlemen, who have all the wealth and the power of the country in their hands, I strongly advise, and earnestly exhort, to pay attention to the poor—by the poor I mean the labouring class of the community, their tenantry and dependents. I advise them for their good to look into their grievances, to sympathize in their distress, and to spread comfort and happiness around their dwellings. It might be that they may not hold their power long, but at all events to attend to the wants and distresses of the poor is their truest interest. ”

“ Any observer of the poor in this city is familiar with the appearance among them of that most distressing and most dangerous symptom, the home-feeling for the slum that opposes all efforts at betterment with dull indifference. ”

“ Certainly no one acquainted with the efforts of our wealthy men to uplift the worthy poor. A certain modern sentimentality demands that poverty be abolished —ignoring those pregnant words of Jesus—"the poor ye have always with you"—forgetting, indeed, that human society is composed of unequal parts, even as the human body ”

“ The fixity of their conviction that they cannot get away from poverty, their resignation to it, their firm belief that they can never rise into prosperity,—these are the most distressing things about the very poor. ”

“ Did the rich esteem the poor, and admit them into their social circle solely on the ground of moral worth, there would be but little danger of these poor ever forfeiting their standing, by plunging into the floods of intemperance and crime. ”

“ And the condition of the poor and all those things. She knows more about the condition of the poor than any one I've ever met; what they earn and what they eat, and how many of them live in a room. So dreadfully crowded, you know—perfectly shocking. ”

“ Nor is it the poor alone who are stricken with discontent. Clearer thought and saner feelings are beginning to make it evident that in the march of true civilization no one class can remain hopelessly behind. ”

“ He must be made acquainted with the real situation of the Poor—with the extent and magnitude of their misfortunes and sufferings, before it can be expected that he should enter warmly into measures calculated for their relief. ”

“ He shook with rage at the thought of the extreme poverty of the poor, whom the world pretends are robbed only of luxury but who are denied such necessities as the right to watch beside the beloved sick. ”

“ They live among and on the poor, and one of the bitterest trials of poverty is the continual presence and preying of these parasites who like other vermin pursue them and cannot be kept off. Their only common crime is desperate, infinite poverty—poverty beyond hope, for they have nothing—not work, nor the hope of work—not even the power to work, if it should be offered them. ”

“ But I am sure that the poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness and revelations of God. ”

“ That, monsieur," turning to us who waited a direction, "is the reason we cannot very much help what are called the poor. Some great failing brings them to that condition—laziness, stupidity or vice, and your aid will never give them energy, wisdom or virtue." ”