William James Quotes About Poverty

Quotes about: Poverty

• We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly - the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.

  William James

  Fighting, Attachment, Athletic

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.124, Xist Publishing

• We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition

  William James

  Ambition, Order, Political

  William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.368, Courier Corporation

• The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.

  William James

  Fear, Civilization, Class

  William James (1987). “Writings, 1902-1910”, p.334, Library of America

• It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.

  William James

  Exercise, Men, Giving

  William James (2013). “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, p.368, Courier Corporation

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