Quotes About Poverty

Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother?

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

In the Ghetto, I'd been trying to write for years.

We want to make everybody mad enough to look at the ghetto right in their own state, not just to look at the middle-class and the rich areas.

It's a hard sport. You don't come from a rich family wanting to be a boxer. Rich kids get hit in the face, they go home. Poor kids come back. They see boxing as a way out.

EPITAPH Now I'm not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is not illusory, we are From crimson thread to toe tag If you are not disturbed there is something seriously wrong with you, I'm sorry And I know who I am I'll be a voice coming from nowhere, inside-- be glad for me.

Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body, and then that contempt was the supreme thing: - the soul wished the body lean, monstrous, and famished. Thus it thought to escape from the body and the earth. But that soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished; and cruelty was the delight of this soul! So my brothers, tell me: What does your body say about your soul? Is not your soul poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency?

But strangers and the poor may pluck for themselves the fruit from my tree: that causes less shame. But beggars should be entirely done away with! Truly, it annoys one to give to them and it annoys one not to give to them.

Poor. — Today he is poor, not because they have taken everything away from him but because he has thrown everything away. What is that to him? He is used to finding things. It is the poor who misunderstand his voluntary poverty.

A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty!

Oh! Your poverty, ye men, and your sordidness of soul! As much as ye give to your friend, will I give even to my foe, and will not have become poorer thereby. There is comradeship: may there be friendship!

hunger is not just an economic problem. It is a moral and spiritual problem.

Sanctity means separation from the spirit of the world, with immersion in the activity of the world. Saints would be in the world, not of it; they would have no public relation boosters to publicize them; they would never ask for money; perhaps the one venture which would stand out most in their lives would be poverty of spirit.

greatest poverty of all—the spiritual poverty of seeming abandonment by God:

If we start (as we must) at the bottom of the ladder, having compassion on all men, nothing that happens to others is foreign to us. Their grief is our grief, their poverty our poverty.

It was only after Adam and Eve had by sin lost the inner effulgence of grace that they became conscious of the fact that they were naked. They felt the need for clothes to cover their newfound shame; previously their bodies had Glowed with a man mantle of charity woven by the fingers of God. It is almost universally true that excessive external display betrays an inner poverty and nakedness of the soul

Blessed also are the poor in spirit socially.

Ce qu'il y a de plus heureux dans la richesse, c'est qu'elle permet de soulager la misère d'autrui.

They could hang around all day and nobody paid them any mind because society has trained itself not to see the poor and the destitute. That way, we don't have to think about how the richest society on earth allows so many of its citizens to live in the streets like stray dogs.

Ya lo verán, decía, se volverán a repartir todo entre los curas, los gringos y los ricos, y nada para los pobres... porque éstos estarán siempre tan jodidos que el día en que la mierda tenga algún valor los pobres nacerán sin culo.

No, not rich, he said. I am a poor man with money, not the same thing.

la pauvreté est comme un mal qu'on endort en soi et qui ne donne pas trop de douleur, à condition de ne pas trop bouger. On s'y habitue, on finit par ne plus y prendre garde tant qu'on reste avec elle tapie dans l'obscurité; mais qu'on s'avise de la sortir au grand jour, et on s'effraie, on la voit enfin, si sordide qu'on hésite à l'exposer au soleil. (Ch. XIII)

Silent, she thought that poverty was like a sickness you put to sleep inside you, and it didn't hurt too much as long as you didn't move. You grew used to it, you ended up not paying much attention to it as long as you stayed tucked away with it in the dark; but when you took the notion of going out with it in daylight, it became frightening to the sight, so ugly you could not expose it to the sun.

Kahlo's letters from New York in the 1930s complement her visual critique: I don't like high society here at all and I feel . . . indignation at all these moneybags around here, as I've seen thousands of people in the most terrible poverty, without anything to eat or anywhere to sleep, it's what has struck me most here, it's frightful to see the rich throwing parties day and night while thousands and thousands of people are dying of hunger.16