Poor

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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! ”

“ Not poor with the arrogant poverty complained of by certain people who have five or six thousand a year to live upon, and who yet swear they can hardly manage to make both ends meet, but really poor,—downright, cruelly, hideously poor, with a poverty that is graceless, sordid and miserable? ”

“ I have found it difficult to keep my poverty these late years but I have not failed. I'm about as poor as you are, I guess. I could enjoy riches, but I want to be poor so I may not forget what is due to the people among whom I was born—you who live in small houses and rack your bones with toil. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The poor indeed may prove their watchful cares, That nicely sift and weigh their mean affairs, From scanty earnings nibbling portions small, As mice, by bits, steal cheese with rind and all; But why should statesmen for mechanics carve, What are they fit for but to work and starve. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ The poor might be made rich, the sick well, the sad merry, the loveless beloved—in one moment—if they could only know when that moment comes! But not once in a million million lifetimes do they hit upon it ”

“ The poor, they say, are rich in poor things, and this lad grew to manhood with a multitude of mean little vices and dirty ways which showed like a sign on his pale weak face, and summed up the trivial soul within for you at the first glance. ”

“ Out upon the folly which, in estimating human misery, allows aught to bear comparison with the agony of the poor! I use the word poor relatively; I call not those poor to whom honesty brings self-respect, whose habits and whose means have gone together, and whose industry is its own support. But those are the poor whose exertion supplies not their wants—to whom cold, hunger, and weariness, are common feelings; who have known better days—to whom the past furnishes contrast, and the future fear. ”

“ Then 'tis the same, no matter which
Of us is poor, or which is rich.
Let each man have enough this day,
Since those that can are glad to pay;
There's nothing now too rich or good
For poor men, not the King's own food. ”

“ If poverty has its hardships, wealth has its annoyances. If wealth can satisfy caprices, when satisfied they do not give the same delight as the cheap enjoyments from time to time indulged in by the poor. ”

“ I had, poor myself, been brought up among the poor, and nothing, since I can remember forming an idea, so much astonished and jarred with my feelings as the thought of how the rich could spend so much on themselves, while any of their fellow-creatures were in destitution. ”

“ He then goes on to remark that he saw the rich suffering the same as the poor,
"Trouble and life are truly near akin. With the luxurious or the glorious life Trouble consorts, and in the life of poverty Lasts with it to the end." ”

“ I have been taught to know what the poor suffer. I know their feelings, their temptations, their hardships, their sad mistakes, and the frightful mistakes and oversights the rich make concerning them, and the ways to give them true and helpful help. ”

“ You who come into the world amid luxury and splendour, who have never been required to work for a single comfort, who have the means of gratifying expensive tastes, and who grudge no expenditure on the objects of your fancy:—was it meant that you were to sustain no relation of help and sympathy to the poor, especially your neighbors, your tenants, or your workpeople? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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! ”

“ I have acquired the certainty that the poor are made poorer, the sorrowing more sad, whenever it is from a fellow worm we look for aid or comfort; and that the best, the most upright intentions will not shield the unprotected from those who are only strong from our incapacity to resist. ”

“ Many of the evils of poverty are imaginary, arising from mistaken notions we may entertain as to what constitutes happiness and comfort. There is not such a difference as some men imagine between the poor and 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That the poor have strange, one might almost say occult, powers, seems to me proved. The downtrodden with whom I dealt were, so far as I could judge, the very pies and daws of existence, who, one might reasonably suppose, would be grateful for whatever hips and haws and other chance berries the bleak winter of their calamities left them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But ye would be better if ye thought what misery your comfortable, indolent, indisposition to open a purse, or to read a little account, often inflicts upon the poor; if ye pictured to yourselves the backward start of hopeless disappointment of some poor woman whose husband comes home without his money—the starvation, the obliteration of so many hopes, and the weary sorrowful days of a whole family. ”

“ Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me;
Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.—Proverbs, xxx. 8, 9.
Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.—Luke, vi. 20.
In a great trial of affliction, the abundance of their joy, and their deep poverty, abounded unto the riches of their liberality.—II. Corinthians, viii. 2.
If well thou view’st us with no squinted eye,
No partial judgment, thou wilt quickly rate
Thy wealth no richer than my poverty ”

“ Therefore, when I find in the tenth chapter of Proverbs this: 'The rich man's wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty,' I shake hands with the author, and travel with him for this trip at least. The prophet does not say that their destruction is ignorance, or vice, or sin, or any of the ordinary blossoms of poverty which it is the fashion to refer to as its root. He tells us the truth—the destruction of the poor is their poverty. ”

“ When we sum up all the advantages enjoyed by this and other favored bodies and classes in the middle ages, the reflection naturally suggests itself—what must have been the condition of the poor, who possessed no privileges and bore all the financial burdens? ”

“ Do not tell of the poverty of your parents, or the hardships of your early life; to do any of these things is to mentally class yourself with the poor for the time being, and it will certainly check the movement of things in your direction. ”

“ The poverty of the very poor is not, he contends, either a cause or an effect of the riches of the very rich, nor would it be relieved by their permanent impoverishment. “That it is not a cause of their riches, is obvious from the fact that if by any change pauperism and misery were suddenly abolished, the rich would be all the richer.” ”

“ The poor are set to labour,—for what? Not the food for which they famish: not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels: not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So that poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty, the shame of being thought poor, is a great and fatal weakness, though arising, in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves. ”

“ If cares and troubles, envy, grief, and fear,
The bitter fruits be which fair riches bear,
If a new poverty grow out of store,
The old plain way, ye gods! let me be poor.
A Paraphrase on an Ode in Horace’s Third Book, beginning thus:— “Inclusam Danaen turris ahenea.” ”

“ I must guard myself, because the Lord has chosen the poor of this world. But what kind of poor? Now the poor may be divided into three classes. In the first place there is the Lord's poor, of which you may pick up one here and another there, one in a city, two in a family. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Those who know by experience the miseries of poverty should be compassionate to those who suffer the like, but they are inexcusably barbarous if they be injurious to them. 2. How imperious and griping those commonly are who, being indigent and necessitous, get into power. If a prince prefer a poor man, he forgets that ever he was poor, and none shall be so oppressive to the poor as he, nor squeeze them so cruelly. The hungry leech and the dry sponge suck most. Set a beggar on horseback, and he will ride without mercy. ”

“ The hearts of the rich are hardened. The existence of the poor is a reproach to them." ”

“ To the poor he was the strong, shrewd, wise man who had broken through the hard incrustations of his own poverty, and preached sound counsels of prudence and thrift as general in their application as the existence of human indigence and folly. ”

“ Let us next look at the parents of these vagrants, at the adult poor. It is not easy or needed for this purpose, to define very nicely the limits of a class, and tell where the rich end, and the poor begin. ”

“ “That’s right, grannie! And the rich have to look down on the poor.”
“No, my dear. I did not say that. The rich have to be KIND to the poor.” ”