Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

People don’t want to hear about me having leather walls or gold toilets.

The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it. We do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off – we do not have to stand for this.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that – is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

I’ve got all the money I’ll ever need, if I die by four o’clock.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

Money doesn’t talk, it swears.

I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

If one plays good music, people don’t listen and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

I don’t think the Christian Right dominates America in the way some in the media believe they do.

No one has ever become poor by giving.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

By rendering the labor of one, the property of the other, they cherish pride, luxury, and vanity on one side; on the other, vice and servility, or hatred and revolt.

Pricey oil makes clear that wealth really is energy in various forms.

Perhaps if you are in support functions waiting on the warfighters to spell out the specifics of what you are to do, you can avoid the consequences of not reading. Those who must adapt to overcoming an independent enemy’s will are not allowed that luxury.

Science is nothing but perception.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

He who lives in our mind is near though he may actually be far away; but he who is not in our heart is far though he may really be nearby.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.

The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

You cannot spend money in luxury without doing good to the poor. Nay, you do more good to them by spending it in luxury, than by giving it; for by spending it in luxury, you make them exert industry, whereas by giving it, you keep them idle.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Reality is a sliding door.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

The more unintelligent a man is, the less mysterious existence seems to him.

To be able to give away riches is mandatory if you wish to possess them. This is the only way that you will be truly rich.

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.

There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.

All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil show it evidently to be a great evil.

Everybody looks like clones and the only people you notice are my age. I don’t notice anybody unless they look great, and every now and again they do, and they are usually 70.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

The reason we want to go on and on is because we live in an impoverished present.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.

I try to give to the poor people for love what the rich could get for money. No, I wouldn’t touch a leper for a thousand pounds; yet I willingly cure him for the love of God.

Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness – great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, great reputation, and great joy.

Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called ‚walking.‘

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

Within one’s own family, money is not the measure of things, unless the person is an absolute Scrooge. Only the most extreme kind of monster would put a price on everything.

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.

Investing for the poor requires participation from the entire community.