Quotes About Destitution

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy.

She only had a few coins to her name, but she had the Midas touch when it came to turning destitution into dreams.

I got up one Christmas morning and we didn't have nothing to eat. We didn't have an apple, we didn't have an orange, we didn't have a cake, we didn't have nothing.

Poverty is never a choice. And if it's a choice, then people choose it unknowingly.

Through no fault of their own, 20 percent of the American labor force was out of work by 1932. Average men woke to find themselves as outcasts, without the emblems of American male identity: jobs, homes, the means to provide for their families.

In his dark story collection Poachers, Tom Franklin, who once worked in a grit factory, offers the sad and sorry lives of people stuck in the back-waters of the Alabama River, who tend to subsist on a steady diet of moon-shine and stale crackers.

Far from being the acme of religion — let alone its telic blossoming — God is the principle of its suppression. The unity of theos is the tombstone of sacred zero, the crumbling granitic foundation of secular destitution.

With poverty everything becomes frightful.

Lover of pleasure without plenty is a lover of poverty.

For the first time in my life I realized what a horrible, miserable, salvationless hell it is to be without money.

Starvation, not sin, is the parent of modern crime.

We have to realize that we cannot earn or win anything from God through our own efforts. We must either receive it as a gift or do without it. The greatest spiritual blessing we receive is when we come to the knowledge that we are destitute. Until we get there, our Lord is powerless. He can do nothing for us as long as we think we are sufficient in and of ourselves. We must enter into His kingdom through the door of destitution.

Were we to be engaged in a war . . we should become absolutely destitute of elephants. . .What would our children do without elephants to amuse them? What would the sick do without the sight of elephants to invigorate them?

And there I will provide for you, because there will be five more years of famine. Otherwise, you and your household and everything you own will come to destitution.í

If a countryman among you becomes destitute and sells himself to you, then you must not force him into slave labor.

If a foreigner residing among you prospers, but your countryman dwelling near him becomes destitute and sells himself to the foreigner or to a member of his clan,

you will serve your enemies the LORD will send against you in famine, thirst, nakedness, and destitution. He will place an iron yoke on your neck until He has destroyed you.

And everyone left in your house will come and bow down to him for a piece of silver or a morsel of bread, pleading, “Please appoint me to some priestly office so that I can eat a piece of bread.”í”

He will turn toward the prayer of the destitute; He will not despise their prayer.

May his children wander as beggars, seeking sustenance far from their ruined homes.

A destitute leader who oppresses the poor is like a driving rain that leaves no food.

And the gates of Zion will lament and mourn; destitute, she will sit on the ground.

Those who once ate delicacies are destitute in the streets; those brought up in crimson huddle in ash heaps.

Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon.