Quotes About Luxuries

As we discussed in Chapter 1, the path to wealth necessitates certain sacrifices. One of the most significant sacrifices involves diverting windfalls, such as bonuses or unexpected monetary gains, away from immediate luxuries and into savings or investments.

So you fell out of the sky, too? the Little Prince asked the pilot who tells the story, and I thought yes, I'd fallen out of the sky, too, but there was no possible testimony of my fall, there was no black box that anybody could consult, nor was there any black box of Ricardo Laverde's fall, human lives don't have these technological luxuries to fall back on.

Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.

THE LUXURIES WE indulge in eventually come to seem to be necessities, as if we could not live without them. —RABBI YISRAEL SALANTER (1810–1883)

Luxuries and indulgences were distractions from true greatness, tawdry and ephemeral baubles that dissipated energy that could be directed toward more meaningful and durable accomplishments in the world around him.

A reminder that for some people in this world, freedom and ordinary aren't basic rights. They're luxuries you should never take for granted.

It was a house halfway between this and that, between upper-middle-class luxuries and absentminded squalor. My father had been too distracted, while he was alive

Spite and ill-nature are among the most expensive luxuries in life.

Positive emotions are not trivial luxuries, but instead might be critical necessities for optimal functioning.

This is because the desire for luxuries is not a natural desire. Natural desires, such as a desire for water when we are thirsty, can be satisfied; unnatural desires cannot.12 Therefore, when we find ourselves wanting something, we should pause to ask whether the desire is natural or unnatural, and if it is unnatural, we should think twice about trying to satisfy it.

Possessing wealth, he observes, won't enable us to live without sorrow and won't console us in our old age. And although wealth can procure for us physical luxuries and various pleasures of the senses, it can never bring us contentment or banish our grief.

No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.

Benjamin Franklin had predicted as much nearly a century before, commenting that with the introduction of slavery, "the Poor are by this Means deprived of Employment, while a few Families acquire vast Estates; which they spend on Foreign Luxuries, and educating their Children in the Habits of those Luxuries; the same Income is needed for the Support of one that might have maintain'd 100."57

As soon as we mistake our ease for our security, our conveniences for our human rights, our luxuries for our entitlements, we aren't culturally distinct anymore. Then we're part of someone else's corporate plan, we're a predictable, fulfilled expectation; we're a black dot on a bottom line.

You mustn't get me used to too many luxuries. One doesn't miss what one has never had; but it's awfully hard going without things after one has commenced thinking they are his.

Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships.

The fact that I get to spend my life making objectively useless things means that I don't live in a postapocalyptic dystopia. It means I am not exclusively chained to the grind of mere survival. It means we still have enough space left in our civilization for the luxuries of imagination and beauty and emotion—and even total frivolousness.

With that solitude came the greatest luxuries: the time to read, the opportunity to wander, and the chance to think new thoughts.

My stroller of choice is the Graco Classic. It's the '70s Buick of strollers, bulky with a complete absence of style. There are no good lines on the Graco. Yes, it has cup holders, like any self-respecting car or stroller does these days, but the luxuries stop there.

What we're looking at is a future where cars will be comfortable and safe and offer the luxuries of both home and office. That means lots of sensors and software, as well as the critical safety systems to protect the car's information from hackers.

One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations

luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

I may not own any carpets, but you've got to get your priorities right when it comes to life's luxuries. In my case it was music, microwave and movies—probably in that order.

What if all my silly little individual purchases do matter? What if I joined a different movement, one that was less enticed by luxuries and more interested in justice? What if I believed every dollar spent is vital, a potential soldier in the war on inequality?