Beggars Quotes

[Describing France:] Every place swarms with beggars ... because the Poor depend upon private Charity for Support, instead of being provided for by Parishes as in England or Towns in America.

When I was 17, I went to India for six weeks and had what, at the time, was a very challenging trip. You walk down the street and you see lepers and beggars, and there were several of us, a group of Americans. I remember we were just trying to park one night somewhere and people were just sleeping in the parking lot.

There is quite a large clan of Scotties among American beggars. He is a good beggar for the simple reason that he is a good talker. Almost every Scotch beggar I met in the States of America was inclined to be talkative, and yet they all managed to conceal their private affairs.

I was out there for 12 days. There are more beggars in Soho than there are in Kabul.

There are at this day in Scotland two hundred thousand people begging from door to door. These are not only no way advantageous, but a very grievous burden to so poor a country … It were better for the nation if they were sold to the galleys or West Indies, than that they should continue any longer to be a burden and curse upon us.

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas.

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

The house I was born in in Somalia was right next to a big market. A lot of beggars or panhandlers would be in front of our house constantly, and my grandfather and grandmother would always invite them in to have food with us and have them take whatever was left over.

Beggars market their incapacity.

All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious.

The heads of lords lay strewn about the ground, like figs that sell a thousand for a fils. Fallen princes' bloated corpses lay like full wine-skins or women big in the womb. Slaves lay beside their masters, beggars next to kings, all one in rank, all turned to dung; unburied in the field they lay, they and their king Zuhair. Not one in ten, one in ten thousand survived, like grapes unpicked at harvest's end, and Andalus was rid of Slays, the host of Almeria crushed, her kingdom gone.

Know that no one can have indulged in the Holy Writers sufficiently, unless he has governed churches for a hundred years with the prophets, such as Elijah and Elisha, John the Baptist, Christ and the apostles... We are beggars: this is true.

A court is an assembly of noble and distinguished beggars.

Every time you think of doing some charity, you think there is some beggar to take your charity. If you say, "O Lord, let the world be full of charitable people!" - you mean, let the world be full of beggars also. Let the world be full of good works - let the world be full of misery. This is out-and-out slavishness!

We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence.

If our beggars of England should, with so much ease as they, furnish themselves with food at all seasons, there would not be so many starved in the streets, neither would so many gaoles [jails] be stuffed, or gallouses furnished with poore wretches, as I have seen them.

If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.

They are but beggars that can count their worth.

Choosers will be beggars if the begging's not their choosing.

The habit of begging, that plague of tourist resorts, is an incessant nuisance on the Alhambra hill.

Questions are like the knocks of beggarmen, and should not be minded.

We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living.

For a beggar to live at court is not so much as the King to dwell with him in his cottage.

If wishes were stories, beggars would read.