Quotes about avarice

Zhuangzi - The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu

Things joined by profit, when pressed by misfortune and danger, will cast each other aside.

Émile Zola - La Curée

This was the time when the rush for the spoils filled a corner of the forest with the yelping of hounds, the cracking of whips, the flaring of torches. The appetites let loose were satisfied at last, shamelessly, amid the sound of crumbling neighbourhoods and fortunes made in six months. The city had become an orgy of gold and women.

Angelica Hopes -

Loan sharking may mean investment and immediate solutions but desperate loan sharks, who are short of cash, abuse your rights and attack other people's home. ~ Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul

Lisa Clark O'Neill -

Cal opened another cabinet and removed a bottle of anti-inflammatory tablets, placing them on the table in front of her along with the ice pack he snagged from the freezer.She glanced at him, suspicious. “What’s this?” “The drug I offer to all of my victims to make them more compliant. It’s ibuprofen,” he said when she glared at him. “It’ll help with the pain and hopefully keep the swelling down. As will the ice. Do you need help taking your boots off?”“So that it’ll be more difficult for me to

Honoré de Balzac - Lost Illusions

For avarice begins where poverty ends.

Angelica Hopes -

Lack of luxury is not a reason to push others to poverty. ~ Michael A. van Doorn, Odyssey of a Heart, Home of a Soul

Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair

The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts--and let's face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field--is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is...

Justin K. McFarlane Beau -

Greed is taking more than you need to feed. Avarice is hoarding, and stockpiling stolen, rotten goods.

Alexander Hamilton -

When avarice takes the lead in a state, it is commonly the forerunner of its fall.

San Juan de la Cruz - Dark Night of the Soul

Many beginners also at times possess great spiritual avarice. They hardly ever seem content with the spirit God gives them. They become unhappy and peevish because they don't find the consolation they want in spiritual things. Many never have enough of hearing counsels, or learning spiritual maxims, or keeping them and reading books about them. They spend more time in these than in striving after mortification and the perfection of the interior poverty to which they are obliged.

Michel Foucault - The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure

John Connolly -

You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.

Al-Haafidh Ibn Rajab Al-Hanbalee -

Two hungry wolves let loose among sheep are not more harmful then a person craving after wealth and status is to his Deen (Religion).

Ibn Rajab The Evil of Craving for Wealth and Status -

There is nothing more to chasing after wealth than the wastage of a person’s noble life for that which has no value. Instead he could have earned a high rank (in Paradise) and everlasting bliss, but he lost this due to his craving after provision – which had already been assured to him and allotted to him, and it was not possible for anything to come to him except what was decreed for him – then on top of this he does not benefit from that, but rather abandons it and leaves it for someone else.H

Ibn Rajab The Evil of Craving for Wealth and Status -

From the subtle afflictions caused by love of status is seeking after and aspiring positions of authority – this is something whose reality is hidden and obscure. It is not understood except by those who have knowledge of Allah, those who love Him and who are at enmity with those ignorant ones from His creation who desire to compete with Him with regard to His Lordship and Divinity and right to worship, despite their despicability and the contemptible position they have before Allah and in the e

Robert Paul Wolff -

It is no exaggeration to say that the rich own most of what there is that is not nailed down.

Antonella Gambotto-Burke - Mouth

Corruption,' Jordan Belfort believes, 'is endemic to human being. I mean, even men in monasteries - where enticement is hard to come by – even men in those circumstances have sex with other men and abuse children. Look at the Catholic Church! Man is an imperfect animal and he is corruptible, okay? And in finance, the liquid nature of the market makes corruption very easy. On Wall Street, this liquidity is so in your face -' he suddenly grits his teeth - 'that if you have even the slightest predi

Socrates -

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon -

Said will be a little ahead, but done should follow at his heel.

Victor Hugo - Les Misérables

Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.

Lillian Hellman - The Little Foxes

Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.

Lou Reed - The Raven

They listen to the music of idiots and amuse themselves with the sordid miseries of their businesses. They are not the things of angels or of any higher outpost that humanity might aspire to. Your loathsome vomitous businessman king is of the lowest order, his advisors crumbling mockeries of education driven by avarice. My love, dress them in the suits of mockery, and in their advanced state of stupidity and senility, burn and destroy them, so their ashes might join the compost which they so muc

Kenneth Patchen - Collected Poems

Take taking from those that give & nobody anywhere will need any more such gifts.

Justin K. McFarlane Beau -

Avarice is opposed to nobility.It believes that by robbing many of all they have, that it (greed) is cloaked in the nobility that is the birthmark of the people.

Sue Fortin - Closing In

The avarice, the hunger for materialistic possessions and the dependency upon alcohol had gradually become stronger and stronger. And now, it was the sum total of what she was.

James Gould Cozzens - Castaway

Descending the endless stairs for the sixth time, Mr. Lecky thought of all the goods those closed doors hid. Fantastic was the discouragement it caused him. Aware of such variety and great quantity, Mr. Lecky saw the danger of forgetting or never even imagining things which, discovered, he would want. Everlastingly midway between two equal errors, to which could he cleave? To have time for everything, one must make haste. To gain access to everything, one must be patient.Moreover, hasty, or pati

Lord Dunsany - Monster Mix

Now there was great rejoicing at the rumor of Alderic's quest, for all folk knew that he was a cautious man, and they deemed that he would succeed and enrich the world, and they rubbed their hands in the cities at the thought of largesse; and there was joy among all men in Alderic's country, except perchance among the lenders of money, who feared they would soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also because men hoped that when the Gibbelins were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter their hi

William Donaldson -

Avarice is patriotic!

E.A. Bucchianeri - Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.

Ronald Rolheiser - The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns of life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an overeating, not in terms of food but in terms of trying to drink in too much of life...And constancy of all three together account for the fact that we are so habitually self-absorbed by heartaches, headaches, and greed for experience that we rarely find the time and space to be in to

Matshona Dhliwayo -

If you push your luck too hard, fortune's muscles might tear.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The writer of this legend then recordsIts ghostly application in these words:The image is the Adversary old,Whose beckoning finger points to realms of gold;Our lusts and passions are the downward stairThat leads the soul from a diviner air;The archer, Death; the flaming jewel, Life;Terrestrial goods, the goblet and the knife;The knights and ladies all whose flesh and boneBy avarice have been hardened into stone;The clerk, the scholar whom the love of pelfTempts from his books and from his nobler

Émile Zola - The Fortune of the Rougons

They again kissed each other and fell asleep. The patch of light on the ceiling now seemed to be assuming the shape of a terrified eye, that stared wildly and fixedly upon the pale, slumbering couple who reeked with crime beneath their very sheets, and dreamt they could see a rain of blood falling in big drops, which turned into golden coins as they plashed upon the floor.

Robert G. Ingersoll - Woman and Child

I do not see how it is possible for a man to die worth fifty million of dollars, or ten million of dollars, in a city full of want, when he meets almost every day the withered hand of beggary and the white lips of famine. How a man can withstand all that, and hold in the clutch of his greed twenty or thirty million of dollars, is past my comprehension. I do not see how he can do it. I should not think he could do it any more than he could keep a pile of lumber on the beach, where hundreds and th

George R.R. Martin - A Game of Thrones

We Lannisters do have a certain pride," said Tyrion Lannister.“Pride?” Catelyn snapped. His mocking tone and easy manner made her angry. “Arrogance, some might call it. Arrogance and avarice and lust for power.”“My brother is undoubtedly arrogant,” Tyrion Lannister replied. “My father is the soul of avarice, and my sweet sister Cersei lusts for power with every waking breath. I, however, am innocent as a little lamb. Shall I bleat for you?” He grinned.

Lord Dunsany - Monster Mix

Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King's Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among the makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins' hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valorous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to

Mokokoma Mokhonoana - The Use and Misuse of Children

Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible.

Related Quote Subjects

avarice

greed

desire

envy