Inspirational Quotes on Greed

“My heart is hardy, for I have suffered much on the seas and the battlefield: this will be only something more. But a ravenous belly cannot be hid, damn the thing. It gives a world of trouble to men, makes them fit out fleets of ships and scour the barren sea, to bring misery on their enemies.”

“The Utopians wonder how any man should be so much taken with the glaring doubtful lustre of a jewel or a stone, that can look up to a star or to the sun himself; or how any should value himself because his cloth is made of a finer thread: for how fine soever that thread may be, it was once no better than the fleece of a sheep, and that sheep was a sheep still for all its wearing it.”

“There never were greed and cunning in the world yet, that did not do too much, and overreach themselves. It is as certain as death.”

“How stand I, then, That have a father killed, a mother stained, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep, while to my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain? O, from this time forth My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth! ”

“Whenever we have excess, giving should be our natural response. It should be the automatic decision, the obvious thing to do in light of Scripture and human need.”

“Hatred and greed are heavy loads. Your motive, on the other hand, is love. And instead of priding yourselves on your cunning, you recognize how weak you are...so weak that you must depend totally on the Spirit of God.”

“Or can it be thought that they who heap up an useless mass of wealth, not for any use that it is to bring them, but merely to please themselves with the contemplation of it, enjoy any true pleasure in it? The delight they find is only a false shadow of joy. Those are no better whose error is somewhat different from the former, and who hide it, out of their fear of losing it; for what other name can fit the hiding it in the earth, or rather the restoring to it again, it being thus cut off from being useful, either to its owner or to the rest of mankind? And yet the owner having hid it carefully, is glad, because he thinks he is now sure of it. It if should be stole, the owner, though he might live perhaps ten years after the theft, of which he knew nothing, would find no difference between his having or losing it; for both ways it was equally useless to him.”

“To what crime do you not drive the hearts of men, accursed hunger for gold?”

“[A]nd you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it." [ (1865)]”

“The single and peculiar mind is bound With all the strength and armor of the mind To keep itself from noyance, but much more That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests The lives of many. The cess of majesty Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw What's near it with it; or it is a massy wheel Fixed on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortised and adjoined, which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.”

“We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.”

“The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always do so when they can, and for this they will be praised not blamed; but when they cannot do so, yet wish to do so by any means, then there is folly and blame.”

“As long as you want anything very much, especially more than you want God, it is an idol.”

“A civil guest will no more talk all, than eat all the feast.”

“You may as soon fill a bag with wisdom, a chest with virtue, or a circle with a triangle, as the heart of man with anything here below. A man may have enough of the world to sink him, but he can never have enough to satisfy him.”

“I continually find it necessary to guard against that natural love of wealth and grandeur which prompts us always, when we come to apply our general doctrine to our own case, to claim an exception.”

“It sets one dreaming—to interchange thoughts with beings whose thinking had an organic background wholly different from ours (other senses, other appetites), to be unenviously humbled by intellects possibly superior to our own yet able for that very reason to descend to our level, to descend lovingly ourselves if we met innocent and childlike creatures who could never be as strong or as clever as we, to exchange with the inhabitants of other worlds that especially keen and rich affection which exists between unlikes; it is a glorious dream. But make no mistake. It is a dream. We are fallen. We know what our race does to strangers. Man destroys or enslaves every species he can. Civilized man murders, enslaves, cheats, and corrupts savage man. Even inanimate nature he turns into dust bowls and slag-heaps. There are individuals who don’t. But they are not the sort who are likely to be our pioneers in space. Our ambassador to new worlds will be the needy and greedy adventurer or the ruthless technical expert. They will do as their kind has always done. What that will be if they meet things weaker than themselves, the black man and the red man can tell. If they meet things stronger, they will be, very properly, destroyed.”

“There is a perpetual frost in the pockets of some rich people; as soon as they put their hands into them, they are frozen so they cannot draw out their purses. Had I my way, I would hang all misers; but reversing the common mode, I would hang them up by the heels, that their money might run out of their pockets.”

“It ill becomes the servant to seek to be rich, and great, and honoured in that world where his Lord was poor, and mean, and despised.”

“Riches enlarge, rather than satisfy appetites.”