Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux Quotes

Poverty snatches the reins out of the hand of piety.

Everything that poverty touches becomes frightful.

Poverty made a sound like a wet cough in the shadows of the room.

It is a kind of blindness--poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

We were poor, my mother and I, living in a world of doom and gloom, pessimism and bitterness, where storms raged and wolves scratched at the door.

Put all other sufferings on one side of the scale, and poverty on the other, and poverty would be heavier.

nothing more afflicts the mind of man than Poverty

My father made about $25 a week. We always lived just on the edge.

Poverty ennobles no one; it brutalizes common people and makes them hungry and old.

Poverty urges us to do and suffer anything that we may escape from it, and so leads us away from virtue.

Poverty is one of them kind of misfortunes that we all of us dread but none of us pity.

I was very poor and I was a waitress, and it's hard to be a poor waitress in New York.

The hard part that I had to go through in life, period, is living in poverty and not being able to get what I want.

For a long time, I couldn't even afford food and clothing. I climbed from the very bottom of the society.

There's a real sense of desperation when you grow up in poverty.

I don't really believe in the myth of being poor but happy. At the poorest times in my life, I wasn't happy. I was just hungry.

We hate our squalor.

We're living in hard times.

In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.

… the unhappy Peasant cannot survive in his humble shelter; today pigswill is his only nourishment; what was once lavished on swine is now shared between man and beast. The People ask only for bread; they are even willing to pay for it with the sweat of their brows: at least let them eat it without watering it with tears.

My mother had various jobs, from where she was regularly fired as politically undesirable. I often saw her crying and mumbling that we'll starve to death.

When I started, I had nothing. Because my family was really, really, really poor.

Not having a roof over your head at night must be frightening, cold, lonely and depressing. To be seriously ill as well must be beyond upsetting.