"Poverty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so hungry to get hold of it, that very little could be rescued for such objects. Even MILES COVERDALE, who did the people the inestimable service of translating the Bible into English (which the unreformed religion never permitted to be done), was left in poverty while the great families clutched the Church lands and money. The people had been told that when the Crown came into possession of these funds, it would not be necessary to tax them; but they were taxed afresh directly afterwards. It was fortunate for them, ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... product of human energy that it has improved continuously the economic status of the mass of people. Ours has been a highly productive social organization. On the way up from the elemental stages of society we have eliminated slavery and serfdom and are now far on the way to the elimination of poverty. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... five years in Spain as, "if not the most eventful"—he cannot refrain from that vainglorious dark hint—yet "the most happy years" of his existence. Spain was to him "the most magnificent country in the world": it was also "one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is not treated with contempt, and I may add, where the wealthy are not blindly idolized." His book is a song of wild Spain when Spain ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... backed the enterprise, and it was common property, undenied by him or anyone else, that the chief object in the speculation was the love of the prima donna, Carmenita Malban. And, Bob, she was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. The story was that she was a countess or something of the sort. Poverty forced her to make use of a glorious voice, and the devil sent Pagani to young Pavesi, who was then a student with some ripping big master, in the hope that he would interest the young man in a scheme ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... it all there was one longing, one yearning for all that she had lost, all she had wantonly thrown away. Suffering Creek, with its poverty-stricken home on the dumps, suggested paradise to her now. She yearned as only a mother can yearn for the warm caresses of her children. She longed for the honest love of the little man whom, in the days of her arrogant womanhood, she had so mercilessly despised. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... although possessed of excellent natural elements and traits which must develop as time goes on. They form a strong, virile backbone to the country, but the conditions of their life are at present but little removed from serfdom, due to their general poverty as a class and to the monopolisation of the ownership of land by the upper classes. In this connection it is to be recollected that the natives of the civilised pre-Hispanic States of the Americas—as Mexico and Peru—enjoyed an excellent system of individual land-tenure, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... logs, clustering around a white church with five green domes. It is a monotony which nothing but the richest culture can prevent from becoming tiresome. Culture is to Nature what good manners are to man, rendering poverty of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... passed their novitiate in the deserts, and when not engaged in their religious functions were supposed to spend their time in caves. They renounced all commerce with the world, and lived in contemplation, temperance, and frugality, and in absolute poverty.... The Peruvians were required to fast before sacrificing to the gods, and to bind themselves by vows of chastity and abstinence from nourishing food.... There were ascetic orders for old men and nunneries for widows among the Totomacs, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... to play at pretending together. When they sat down to their dinner they used to rub their old lamp and play that it was Aladdin's wonderful lamp, and that their poor table was spread with a wonderful feast, instead of just bread and cheese. They tried to make light of their poverty." ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... dramatist's course before me than if I belonged to his order. I felt, certainly, the support he feels, I participated in his technical amusement, I tasted to the full the bitter-sweetness of his draught—the beauty and the difficulty (to harp again on that string) of escaping poverty EVEN THOUGH the references in one's action can only be, with intensity, to each other, to things exactly on the same plane of exhibition with themselves. Exhibition may mean in a "story" twenty different ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... England) in union with and fidelity to the Company, as he used to do, God preserved him, prospered and exalted him; but when he began to leave this path, in a manner, the threads of his plans and life were cut short together.'' As a cardinal Allen had lived in poverty and he died ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this rostrum in 1949, I heard a great American President, Harry S. Truman, declare this: "The American people have decided that poverty is just as wasteful and just as ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson
... she's coped with worse than our women," said Little Josh. "With poverty staring her in the face and old Dick Buck for a grandfather, she's kept her head up and made a living and got a tidy bank account, so I hear. All by herself, too! I think I'll call when you do, Big Josh, but I'll fight ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... not be acting fair towards them to assume that the mass of the people of this island would remain in the state of political indifference to which poverty and slavery had reduced them. They were now free, every man to rise as rapidly as he could; and the day was not very distant when it would be demonstrated by the change of representatives that would be seen in that house. It did appear to him, that under the pretext of extending the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... man, alone, In abject poverty, with hand Uplifted o'er a block of stone That took a shape at his command And smiled upon him, fair and good— A perfect work of womanhood, Save that the eyes might never weep, Nor weary hands be crossed in sleep, Nor hair that fell ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... plain to be seen that she was wavering. Billy, watching the little scene, with mingled emotions, saw the glance with which the girl swept the bare little room; and she knew that there was not a patch or darn or poverty spot in sight, or out of sight, which ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... Nich. Breton." And the "Address" after it is signed, "Your poore friend or servant N.B." I am aware that these phrases are sometimes used in a figurative sense, but am disposed to think that here they are intended for something real. And I am at a loss how to reconcile these expressions of poverty with his being the purchaser and enjoyer of such an estate. I shall wait, therefore, with considerable anxiety till it may suit the pleasure or convenience {410} of Mr. Collier to communicate to the world the proofs he has obtained of the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 26. Saturday, April 27, 1850 • Various
... found a powerful antagonist in the person of Epicurus, and the Epicureans and Stoics have since treated each other as rival sects. Zeno's school appears to have been generally a resort for the poor, and it was a common joke amongst his adversaries, that poverty was the charm for which he was indebted for his scholars. The list of his disciples, however, contains the names of some very rich and powerful men, who may have regarded the Stoic theory as a powerful counter-agent ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... resumed the little Frenchman, after a short pause,—"one cannot help one's self, after it is too late. Allons, donc!—I had lately, thinking over the matter in the light of my intense desire to begin a career, and under the pressure of urgent poverty, given up the notion of bringing my invention to absolute perfection as a system of telegraphing. Instead of elaborating a complete alphabet, I proposed to carry into effect a substitute already perfected, one ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... means, invariably has recourse to a coup-d'etat. An oligarchical party is necessarily not numerous. Its members in general attempt, by noble lineage or vast possessions, to compensate for their poverty of numbers. The Whigs, in 1830, found themselves by accident in place, but under very peculiar circumstances. They were in place but not in power. In each estate of the realm a majority was arrayed against ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... the poor themselves indirectly, if not directly, are impoverished by supporting these unproductive classes out of the produce of labour. If prevention is better than cure, work is any day better than charity. After all, too, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and nowhere are the poor more poverty-stricken and needy than in Rome. The swarms of beggars which infest the town are almost the first objects that strike a stranger here, though strangers have no notion of the distress of Rome. The winter, when visitors are here, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... Now I was lost in a little green hollow overhung with thick-leaved shrubbery, and then came out upon an elevation, from which, through an opening in the trees, the eye caught glimpses of the city, and the little esplanade at the foot of the hill where the poor lie buried. There poverty hires its grave and takes but a short lease of the narrow house. At the end of a few months, or at most of a few years, the tenant is dislodged to give place to another, and he in turn to a third. "Who," says Sir Thomas ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... he had thus taken from them were spoiling in his stores, while the poor wretches from whom they were plundered were pining in poverty. Though the destruction of this tyrant was accidental, the people chose the cucumber-gatherers for their governors, as a mark of their gratitude for destroying, though accidentally, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... 13, 1847, and addressed to Mrs. Marie Louise Shew, who had been a veritable angel of mercy in the Poe home. She relieved the poverty and helped to care for Virginia (who died January 29), and afterward nursed Poe himself during his severe illness. Mrs. Shew had had some medical training and probably saved Poe's life. This brief poem is instinct with a gratitude and reverence ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... foot-lights, there is always something fascinating in the life of the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are never so unreal as in their own characters. In their shabby bestowal in those mean upper rooms, their tawdry poverty, their merry submission to the errors and caprices of destiny, their mutual kindliness and careless friendship, these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-footed burlesque seemed to be playing rather than living the life of strolling ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... escorts or beggars should ever be allowed on the streets of the city when the Prince was passing. All ugly sights were to be kept from him; he was to be surrounded with such pleasures and such beauties that he would never desire to leave his home; he was to know nothing of the meaning of death; poverty was to be hidden; suffering and sorrow of all sorts were to be concealed in his presence. In these ways, thought the King, any desire to be a priest would be stifled in the Prince, and he would at last become a mighty conqueror as the ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... policy. They forgot to look down upon the poorer classes of the English population, upon whose daily and yearly labor the great establishments they so much admired were sustained and supported. They failed to perceive that the scantily fed and half-clad operatives were not only in abject poverty, but were bound in chains of oppressive servitude for the benefit of favored classes, who were the exclusive objects of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... the interests of her religion and the service of Heaven. She was the first woman who sat at the feet of St. Francis as his disciple, who humbly practised the self-mortification, and resolutely performed the vow of perpetual poverty, which her preceptor's harshest doctrines imposed on his followers. She soon became Abbess of the Benedictine Nuns with whom she was associated by the saint; and afterwards founded an order of her own—the order of "Poor Clares." ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... in the general criticism on the central front, and of the two wings. The first impression is far from that produced by unity, grandeur, or elegance; there is a fantastical assemblage of turrets, attics, and chimneys, and a poverty or disproportion, especially in "the temple-like forms" which complete the ends towards the park. The dome, too, has been sarcastically compared with a "Brobdignagian egg." It strictly belongs to the back part of the palace, and had it been screened from the front, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... the first shock of rage and disappointment, began to accommodate herself as best she could to her altered fortunes and to save and retrench with all her might. She instructed her daughters how to bear poverty cheerfully, and invented a thousand notable methods to conceal or evade it. She took them about to balls and public places in the neighbourhood, with praiseworthy energy; nay, she entertained her friends in a hospitable comfortable manner at the Rectory, and much ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... condition in Kansas City.[52] In this city from 1885 to 1913 a larger per cent of the Negro than of the white children of school age attended the public schools, but the average attendance of the white children enrolled was above that of the Negro children. This he accounted for by the poverty of the Negro population. Since the Negroes were poorer as a whole than the whites, they were more poorly housed and clothed. Consequently the Negro children were more susceptible to sickness and to the disagreeable effects of inclement weather. On this account they were oftener ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... Sir, why it is not our policy to compel our citizens to manufacture our own iron, is that they are far better employed. It is an unproductive business, and they are not poor enough to be obliged to follow it. If we had more of poverty, more of misery, and something of servitude, if we had an ignorant, idle, starving population, we might set up for iron makers against ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... armed Complaint on theft; and cries of blood. There was the murdered corps, in covert laid, And violent death in thousand shapes displayed: The city to the soldier's rage resigned; Successless wars, and poverty behind: Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores, And the rash hunter strangled by the boars: The new-born babe by nurses overlaid; And the cook caught within the raging fire he made. All ills of Mars' his nature, flame and steel; The gasping charioteer beneath ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... said that personage, "follow me before the nearest inspector of police. You may impose upon a simple-minded soldier, sir, but the eye of the law will read your disreputable secret. If I must spend my old age in poverty through your underhand intriguing with my wife, I mean at least that you shall not remain unpunished for your pains; and God, sir, will deny me a very considerable satisfaction if you do not pick oakum from ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... quite convinced also, in his simple way, that his fortune would come; for it had been predicted by a gipsy from Granada at the Trinity Fair on the little crowded market-place at Palma. The prediction had caught the popular fancy. Tomaso's poverty, it must be remembered, was a proverb all over the island. "As poor as Tomaso of the Mill," the people said; it being understood that a church mouse failed to suggest such destitution. Moreover, the gipsy foretold that Tomaso should make his own fortune with his own ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... The animals had never been saved in an overflow; and besides the cruelty of letting them starve by thousands, the loss to the people was irreparable, as the following year must inevitably be replete with idleness and poverty till more stock could be obtained ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... know what you are for, (I do not know what I am for myself, nor what any thing is for,) But I will search carefully for it even in being foil'd, In defeat, poverty, misconception, imprisonment—for ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... Sir Neville Chamberlain, and who had faced every danger and defeat, rather than tamely suffer the advance of the all-devouring English into his dominions, was proud and unbending still, through all his captivity and poverty and trouble, and weariness of soul and suffering of body; he could bear his calamities like a man, the unrelenting chief of an unrelenting race. But when Isaacs stretched forth his hand and freed him, and bestowed ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... house he looked back more than once at the high wall, wondering at the things it hid. Here was squalid poverty almost under the windows of the great, handsome house where Cousin Jasper lived with everything that heart could desire. It was the poverty, too, of a member of his own family. Here was jealous enmity also, a hatred that seemed to point ominously to ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... scions of noble families. The landlady, in her moments of good humor, used to assert her belief that her lodger was a disguised prince; but if this were the case, he was certainly one that had been overtaken by poverty. His dress, to which the closest attention had been paid, revealed the state of destitution in which he was,—not the destitution which openly asks for alms, but the hidden poverty which shuns communication and blushes at a single ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... is never enmity, nor rage, Nor poisoned calumny, nor envy's breath, Nor shivering poverty, nor decrepit age, Nor loss of vigour, nor the narrow death; Nor idiot laughter, nor the tears men weep, Nor painful exile from one's native soil, Nor sin, nor pain, nor weariness, nor sleep, Nor lust of riches, nor the ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... to kiss the hand of my benefactor, my protector," exclaimed the young man, "the kind hand of the man who extricated me from poverty, distress, and despair; who caused me to be fed, educated, and instructed; and who (until I myself, by his liberal kindness, was enabled to discharge this sacred duty) secured to my poor sick mother an ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... lamentably at every wail of wind, but pausing, now and then, to gnaw a bone he had had enough of a thief s wit to pouch in the house of the blind widow. Stewart, a lean wiry man, covered the way with a shepherd's long stride-heel and toe and the last spring from the knee-most poverty-struck and mean in a kilt that flapped too low on his leg and was frayed to ribbons, a man with but one wish in the world, to save his own unworthy skin, even if every one else of our distressed corps found a sodden and abominable death in the swamps or rocks of that doleful ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... destitute of ease, grace, pliability of manners, and insinuation of address, that they eternally seem to suffer actual misery in their attempts to look gay and careless. Then their pride heads them back at one turn, their poverty at another, their pedantry at a third, their mauvaise honte at a fourth; and with so many obstacles to make them bolt off the course, it is positively impossible they should win the plate. No, Harry, it is the grave folk in Old England who have to fear a Caledonian ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... beggarly subsistence. No prairie-boy will ever carry about a hand-organ and a monkey, or see his sister yoked to the plough, by the side of horse or ox. Blessed be God that there are still places where grinding poverty is unfelt and unfeared! "Riches fineless" belong to these deep, soft fields, and they become picturesque by the thought, as the sea becomes so by the passing of a ship, and the burning desert by the foot-print of a traveller or the ashes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... line with it on the sand from east to west. Then turning towards the south, "Friends and comrades!" he said, "on that side are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion, and death; on this side, ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south." So saying, he stepped across the line. *2 He was followed by the brave pilot Ruiz; next by Pedro de Candia, a cavalier, born, as ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... so long on account of poverty that it brought little of humanizing emotion into his life. He never mentioned his love-life now, or if he did, it was only to sneer obscenely at it. He had long since ceased to kiss his wife or even speak kindly to her. There was no longer any sanctity ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... only be because capital does not exist, disposable for the purpose of employing, if not any other labourers, those very labourers themselves, in producing the articles for their own consumption. Nothing can be more chimerical than the fear that the accumulation of capital should produce poverty and not wealth, or that it will ever take place too fast for its own end. Nothing is more true than that it is produce which constitutes the market for produce, and that every increase of production, if distributed without miscalculation among all kinds of produce ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... obstacle is the indifference of the beloved. One finds rejected poets by the dozens, mourning in the verse of our period. The sweetheart's reasons are manifold; her suitor's inferior station and poverty being favorites. But one wonders if the primary reason may not be the quality of the love offered by the poet, whose extreme humility and idealization are likely to engender pride and contempt in the lady, she being ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... hundred male inhabitants were either soldiers or priests, dependent for supplies of money, clothing, or bread upon Havana; and as the famine had lasted for two years, and it was then three since a vessel had reached them from any place whatever, their poverty was extreme. They were all, too, the "false Catholicks and hireling Priests" whom, beyond all others, Dickenson distrusted and hated. Yet the grim Quaker's hand seems to tremble as he writes down the record of their exceeding kindness; of how they welcomed ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... have published other laws? What is so proper for sin as penance? what is more of the nature of penance, than the sinner's harshness and severity to himself? Is there any thing in this contrary to reason? They are astonished at his ranking poverty among the beatitudes; that he held up the cross as an attraction to his disciples to follow him; that he declared a love of {032} contempt was preferable to the honors of the world. In all this I see the depth of his divine counsels." Such is the language of Bourdaloue and Massillon, preaching ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... unsyllabled in the air above it for the right sponsor to speak it into life. We plead for public convenience simply. We are thinking not of the ears of taste, but of the brain of business. We do not wonder at the monstrous accumulations of the Dead-Letter Office, when we see the actual poverty which our system of naming places has brought about. Pardon us a few statistics, and, as you read them, remember, dear reader, that this is the story of ten years ago, and that the enormous growths of the last decade have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... think that this proceeds from conscious weakness and the desire to have some person through whom one can obtain what he lacks, they assign, indeed, to friendship a mean and utterly ignoble origin, born, as they would have it, of poverty and neediness. If this were true, then the less of resource one was conscious of having in himself, the better fitted would he be for friendship. The contrary is the case; for the more confidence a man has in himself, and the more thoroughly he is fortified by virtue and wisdom, so that ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... to draw large audiences to hear his imitation of birds, &c., but one fatal day it was discovered that the sounds were produced by an instrument—probably a pierced peach-stone—which he concealed in his mouth, and after that no one cared to hear him, and he died in great poverty ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... a sick call and being at the end of his monetary resources—for let his friends give him ever so much he would never leave himself a penny—he had been known to give away his own underclothing, and even to carry away his bed-clothes to relieve some case of abject poverty. ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... of property weighs heavy with the most of mankind; heavier often, than the sacrifices made on the field of battle. Death is popularly considered the maximum of punishment in war, but it is not; reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... Then, in desperation, he sent for the barber to bleed him, for our forefathers had a curious idea that unless they were bled once or twice a year, especially in spring, they would never keep in good health. We perhaps owe some of our frequent poverty of blood to that fancy. The only result of this process was to make Mr Benden feel languid and weak, which was not likely to improve his spirits. Lastly, he went to church, and was shriven—namely, confessed his sins, and was absolved by the priest. ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... half-holiday, looking in vain towards his brother to ascertain if he was doing well or ill. He blabbed all he knew about Rollitt; the condition of his study, the nature of his solitary walks, the poverty of his possessions— everything that could possibly confirm the suspicions against him; and forgot to mention anything which might in the least avail ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... surrender all. It was hardly a year since she had said nay to Arthur, when he asked her to lay her life at the feet of that same Jesus of Nazareth. She refused then, and even one hour ago she would still have refused; but now she would have trudged the highways, poverty-stricken, unknown and obscure, for His dear sake. She would have gone forth, like St. Paul, to the uttermost ends of the earth, she felt she loved Him so! There were tears in her eyes, and a new joy seemed to throb in her heart. She felt so kindly to everyone about ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... a little pale and, although as trim and neat as usual, a little shabby. Her pretty hands in old gloves she had washed herself, her pretty eyes patiently fixed upon the faces of the women who were boring her in her youth and freshness with the business of sickness and poverty, her whole gentle, rather weary aspect, smote Bert's heart with a pain that was half a fierce joy. Never had he loved her in her gaiety and her indifference as he loved her now, when she looked ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... especially slow to believe that a woman who had led the life of incredible profligacy he has described, would, in consequence of "some vision either of sleep or fancy," in which future exaltation was promised to her, assume "like a skilful actress, a more decent character, relieve her poverty by the laudable industry of spinning wool, and affect a life of chastity and solitude in a small house, which she afterwards changed into a magnificent temple." Magdalens have been converted, no doubt, from immoral living, but not ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... determined, as we sought and still seek in this work to act for the profit of the saints generally, to delay both the public meetings and the Report for a few months. Naturally we should have been, of course, as glad as anyone to have exposed our poverty at that time; but spiritually we were unable to delight even then in the prospect of the increased benefit that might be derived by the church at large from our acting as ...
— Answers to Prayer - From George Mueller's Narratives • George Mueller
... Still, the effective wage earned tended to drop: that is, although wages rose when measured in terms of the currency, that rise did not keep pace with the advance in prices, the influx of silver into Europe diminishing its purchasing power. Hence the old problem of dealing with poverty in its two forms—honest inability to work and dishonest avoidance of work— remained acute. There was always a humane desire that the deserving poor should be assisted, and an equally strong sentiment ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... bare as boxes, dropped on the treeless plains, the barbed-wire fences running at right angles, and the towns mere assemblages of flimsy wooden sheds with painted-pine battlement, produced on me the effect of an almost helpless and sterile poverty. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... his office. Wherever he encountered the forsaken of fortune, he found food for sympathy, and, in spite of assurances that he was only encouraging mendicancy, he often gave them money. It was hard for him to believe that there could be abject poverty where there was work for all, and the appeal of man in want to man in plenty was too strong for him easily to resist it. He liked the very frankness of vulgarity and hopeless destitution of these people, and was appalled ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... was all this, but for lack of knowledge? For had those silly ones but known the evils of poverty, what a vile thing it was to wear a dirty shirt, a long beard, and ragged coat; to go without a dinner, or to sponge for it among growling relations; or to be bespattered, or run over in the streets, by the sons of those who were once their fathers' overseers; I say, had ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... companions is something ridiculous," she went on, angrily. "You consider yourself too fine, I suppose, to be made a messenger of." Gertie laughed aloud, a scornful, mocking laugh. "Pride and poverty do not work very well together. You may go to your room now and get your hat and shawl. I shall have the letter written in a very few minutes. There will be no use appealing to mamma. You ought to know by this time we overrule ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... convictions. It has brought home to me and to the world the fact that heroism is a flower which grows in no peculiar soil, and that it blossoms as richly among the unwashed and the underfed as among the children of fortune. This fact only aggravates the extremes of wealth and poverty, and makes them seem ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... the instigation of poverty, Confucius accepted the office of keeper of the stores of grain, and in the following year he was promoted to be guardian of the public fields and lands. It was while holding this latter office that his son was born, and so well known ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... "Poverty of mind accounts for the shortness of the book as a rule," said Galbraith. "I like a long book myself when it is rich in thought. The characters become companions then, and I miss them when we are forced ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... preparations are made for the Gypsy bridal. The wedding-day is certainly an eventful period in the life of every individual, as he takes a partner for better or for worse, whom he is bound to cherish through riches and poverty; but to the Gypsy particularly the wedding festival is an important affair. If he is rich, he frequently becomes poor before it is terminated; and if he is poor, he loses the little which he possesses, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... Eleanor from anything ugly and sordid. He had tried to make light of the situation and reassure her as to results; but he was determined to do it no longer. It wasn't right, he told himself angrily, for anybody to go through life blinded to all the misery and suffering and poverty in the world. He was going to write her to-night and tell her the whole story and spare ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... to travelling that interesting variety which a flat country can never abound with. And, at the same time, they are not in such number as to confer the usual character of poverty which attends them. I was either upon or very near the most considerable in the kingdom. Mangerton, and the Reeks, in Kerry; the Galties in Cork; those of Mourne in Down; Crow Patrick, and Nephin in Mayo, these are the principal in Ireland, and they are of a character, in height and ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... abbey church on the morrow, and were present at the Mass of the day; the poor English were there in small numbers; they could not worship devoutly in company with their oppressors, but frequented little village sanctuaries, too poverty stricken to invite Norman cupidity, where, on that very account, the poor clerics of English race might still minister to their scattered flocks, and preach to them in the language Alfred had dignified by his writings, but which ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... moony look sometimes, grew wild and happy, and had their hour. 'They oughtn't to have called me Fleur,' she mused, 'if they didn't mean me to have my hour, and be happy while it lasts.' Nothing real stood in the way, like poverty, or disease—sentiment only, a ghost from the unhappy past! Jon was right. They wouldn't let you live, these old people! They made mistakes, committed crimes, and wanted their children to go on paying! The breeze died away; midges ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... involves its possessor, is shown with dramatic power by Scott, in his splendid medieval dream, Ivanhoe—in the torture-scene, where the Jew is racked to obtain his gold. In connection with this, it may be noted as a surprising fact that while poverty has always been dreaded, it has ever been exempt from one term of peculiar wretchedness. With all his privation, who ever heard a poor man designated as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... she, "we are infinitely worse off in every way, to-day, than we were under the rule of the Incas. Poverty, misery, oppression, and suffering of every kind are to be met with on all hands and wherever one goes, while four hundred years ago we had a far higher state of civilisation than now exists, in which poverty and oppression, with their countless attendant evils, were unknown. ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... as imperatively required now to furnish the same manly testimony in support of the ability of the race to surmount the remaining obstacles growing out of oppression, ignorance, and poverty. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... perilous career. Romance itself hardly contains any story of a marriage more imprudent and yet more richly rewarded by love. Tone adored his young wife and she adored him. Love came in at their door and, though poverty entered there too, love never flew out at the window. The whole story of Wolfe Tone's public career may be read in the letters which, during their various periods of long separation, no difficulties and no dangers ever prevented him from writing ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... an humble village church where frank and simple poverty exists with the remains of ancient splendour. It is small, as are all churches of its style, and although it does not lack a homely dignity, it is a modest work of XII century Romanesque, and the sonorous title of its consecration in 1242, "the ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the only pretexts for giving this claimant a pension are military service, old age, and poverty. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... the Hero arrived with the oats and bran he had sent back for. So poverty-stricken was the country that Eyre, in the circumstances, resolved to send back nearly the whole of his expedition by the vessel, and then, with only a small party, to push through to King George's Sound or perish in ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... her now? David will not forget her, but he cannot put his arms around her neck, nor cheer her with the sunlight of his bright face. She is alone—none of her kindred near. The lady who took charge of David will do what she can for her, but her heart must yearn for the dear boy that poverty and age compelled her to give to the fostering care ...
— The Nest in the Honeysuckles, and other Stories • Various
... a poverty in these primitive vocabularies even in reference to sensible objects, which in many cases rendered it necessary to employ the same word in more or less extensive significations, and in the Semitic languages the power ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... perpetual agitation and excitement—an agitation, it is true, by no means peculiar to Edinburgh. No painter has ever done justice to the scene which must have been common as the day, when the beautiful young Queen, so little accustomed to the restraints and comparative poverty of her northern kingdom, and able to surround herself with the splendour she loved out of her French dowry, rode out in all her bravery up the Canongate, where every outside stair and high window would be crowded with spectators, and through the turreted ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... not seek ease among the poor, because I concluded that there it could not be found. But I saw many poor whom I had supposed to live in affluence. Poverty has in large cities very different appearances. It is often concealed in splendour and often in extravagance. It is the care of a very great part of mankind to conceal their indigence from the rest. They support themselves by temporary expedients, and every day is lost in contriving ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... of friend and parasite, the poor comrade, complacent and capable in his companionship with a rich youth on bad terms with his family, sharing with him the ups and downs of fortune, picking up the crumbs of prosperous days, or inventing expedients to keep up appearances in the hours of poverty. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... stooping back, and glassy eye, betokened extreme age and infirmity. Her countenance bore the marks of hardship and exposure; while the coarse material of her scanty garments, which scarcely served to defend her from the bleak December wind, showed that even now she wrestled with poverty for life. In one hand she carried a small pitcher, while with the other she leaned ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various
... to others that they know not of." The official figures show that in a period of twenty-two years no less than 71,207 persons committed suicide in France. The causes were various—business embarrassments, domestic chagrins, the brutishness produced by liquor, poverty, insanity, the desire to put an end to physical suffering by "euthanasia," and so on; but they are pretty nearly all included in the "fardels" which Hamlet mentions, from the physical troubles of the "heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... particular god. Soon the crowd in the street noticed that the so-called Christians (the followers of the Christ or "anointed") spoke a very different language. They did not appear to be impressed by great riches or a noble position. They extolled the beauties of poverty and humility and meekness. These were not exactly the virtues which had made Rome the mistress of the world. It was rather interesting to listen to a "mystery" which told people in the hey-day of their glory that their ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... been up to that time a stranger to the plow and shovel was drained and ditched, and very speedily planted to corn and wheat. So fertile did this so-called arid ground prove to be, that one year's crop threw aside all fears of further poverty, and prosperity began to reign supreme. Had the Mormons confined themselves to work, and had abandoned extreme religious and social ideas, impossible in an enlightened age and country, they would have risen long ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... There was fault on both sides, as there always is when people quarrel. And what has been gained? Immense loss of property, and of far more precious lives, an exchange of ease and luxury for a hard struggle with poverty." ...
— Elsie's Womanhood • Martha Finley
... Temecula. He would doubtless return prepared to take Ramona back with him, in case that proved the only alternative left them. Felipe grew wretched as his fancy dwelt on the picture of Ramona's future. He had been in the Temecula village. He knew its poverty; the thought of Ramona there was monstrous, To the indolent, ease-loving Felipe it was incredible that a girl reared as Ramona had been, could for a moment contemplate leading the life of a poor laboring man's ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... chin on her hands, gazing with wide burning eyes at Miss Avies. This girl, whom Maggie was never to see again hung as a picture in the rooms of her mind for the rest of her life—the youth, the desperate anxiety as of one who throws her last piece upon the gaming-table, the poverty of the shabby black dress, the real physical austerity and asceticism of the white cheeks and the thin arms and pale hands—this figure remained a symbol for Maggie. She used to wonder in after years, when fortune had carried her far enough away from ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... She laughed because, being a woman, she felt an inclination to laugh at physical uncomeliness or poverty; because, referring everything to her own little world of actors and actresses, each and every deformity described by the doctor reminded her of some comrade of the boards, stamping itself on her mind like a caricature. Knowing that she herself had a good figure, she delighted ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... flung an arm about Tess and drew her into the winter night. Wind-blown and snow-covered, Young almost carried the shivering girl up the steps into her new home. How luxurious the comfortable furnishings seemed compared to the poverty of the shack! Young helped her off ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... the slothful and lazy are punished; beneath them in two bolge are the passionate and the gluttonous souls, and below again the luxurious and avaricious ones. The poverty of conception in this "Inferno" is not even compensated by the usual good qualities of refinement; one could almost believe that the artist found it so repugnant to his character to depict brutality ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... make up the Soho district of London, or in rapidly shifting New York. All that is needed is youth, or unwilling middle age still playing at youth, and the atmosphere where artistic and literary aspirations are in the air, and poverty wearing a conspicuous stock, and the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," and the relative merits of Tennyson and Browning being talked over to the accompaniment of knives and forks rattling against plates of spaghetti and the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... travels on the Continent, and interviews with distinguished men. His mind at this period (1842) was most occupied with the sad condition of the English people,—everywhere riots, disturbances, physical suffering and abject poverty among the masses, for the Corn Laws had not then been repealed; and to Carlyle's vision there was a most melancholy prospect ahead,—not revolution, but universal degradation, and the reign of injustice. This sad condition of the people was contrasted in his mind with what it had been ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... political charlatan strutting about for the display of his preternatural gift of articulate wind, could have grappled in keen debate, for all those weeks, on the greatest of earthly subjects, with fifty of the ablest men in America, without exposing to their view all his own intellectual poverty, and without losing the very last shred of their intellectual respect for him. Whatever may have been the impression formed of Patrick Henry as a mere orator by his associates in that Congress, nothing can be plainer than ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... know," he replied. "Why in snakes should anybody want to be a sculptor, if you come to that? I would love to sculp myself. But what I can't see is why you should want to do nothing else. It seems to argue a poverty of nature." ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Waterloo or even Inkerman and Balaclava. It never forgets that as long as higher education, culture, foreign travel, knowledge of the world: in short, the qualification for comprehension of foreign affairs and intelligent voting, is confined to one small class, leaving the masses in poverty, narrowness, and ignorance, and being itself artificially cut off at their expense from the salutary pressure of the common burden which alone keeps men unspoilt and sane, so long will that small class be forced to obtain ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... size and of this poverty in an American village," was Betty's thought, "would be a bare and straggling hideousness, with old tomato cans in the front yard. Here is one of the things we have to ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... been noticed that most centenarians have been people who were poor or in humble circumstances, and whose life has been extremely simple. It may well be said that great riches do not bring a very long life. Poverty generally brings with it sobriety, especially in old age, and sobriety is certainly favourable to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... had worked great changes at St. Joseph's—the very atmosphere of the church was different, the sensation was one of culture and refinement, instead of that acrid poverty. From the altar rail to the middle of the aisle the church was crowded—in the free as well as in the paying parts. From the altar rails to the middle of the aisle there were chairs for the ease of the subscribers, and for those who were willing ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Sabbath of the silent tomb: For squalid Want, and the black scorpion Care, Heart-withering fiends! shall never enter there. I sorrow for the ills thy life has known As thro' the world's long pilgrimage, alone, Haunted by Poverty and woe-begone, Unloved, unfriended, thou didst journey on: Thy youth in ignorance and labour past, And thine old age all barrenness and blast! Hard was thy Fate, which, while it doom'd to woe, Denied thee wisdom ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... privation. Not content with this, she in certain instances refused to take pay for the tuition of the children of some of her neighbors, who had befriended her father in his need, and had since fallen into poverty. 'In a word,' added Scott, 'she's a fine old Scotch girl, and I delight in her more than in many a fine lady I have known, and I have known many of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... thought and prevent us from nursing imaginary cares, for when we have undergone the torture of our own forebodings, struggled with the impetuosity and agony of a nature surrendered to itself, we are disposed to look almost with relief on tangible troubles, and to end by appreciating the cares of poverty as salutary distractions from the sickly ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... little to give away. Poverty-stricken and besotted, she had enough to do to struggle ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... ain't rich enough for ostentation, and are too equal in condition and circumstances for the action of jealousy or rivalry; I believe they are the happiest people in the world, but I know they are the kindest. Their feelings are not chilled by poverty or corrupted by plenty; their occupations preclude the hope of wealth and forbid the fear of distress. Dependent on each other for mutual assistance, in those things that are beyond individual exertion, they interchange ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... lifelong friendship with Eugene Field. When the victim happened to be an angry sufferer from a too personal reference to his affairs in the paper, Field would make the most profuse apologies for the scant furnishings of the office, which he shrewdly ascribed to the poverty of the publishing company, and tender his own chair as some ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap of straw, to serve as another bed, and against the wall a much-battered sea-chest and an open basket, containing even now a few rotting oranges, some ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... child, who reads this simple lay, With eyes down-dropt and tender, Remember the old proverb says That pretty is which pretty does, And that worth does not go nor stay For poverty ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... shogun. While their ceaseless civil wars rendered the condition of the country so uncertain and so unsettled, yet the authority of the local rulers tended to preserve peace and dispense a rude kind of justice among their own subjects. Thus while in many parts of Japan poverty and desolation had eaten up everything, and lawlessness and robbery had put an end to industry, yet there were some favored parts of the islands where the strong hand of the daimyos preserved for their people the opportunities of life, and kept alive ...
— Japan • David Murray
... from the poorer traders of the Jews, to which the most indigent add their pence, with the true feelings of Jewish benevolence, in the hope of mitigating the poignant sufferings of the applicants. "The charity which plenty gives to poverty is human and earthly, but it becomes divine and heavenly when ...
— Suggestions to the Jews - for improvement in reference to their charities, education, - and general government • Unknown |
