Poverty is the self's greed and increased despair.

To live miserable we know not why, to have the dread of hunger, to work sore and yet gain nothing—this is the essence of poverty.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

My own experience was too bitter to ever forget it. I had a mother who tried to rear a family, but met with disaster. There is nothing more terrible than when poverty strikes a house and those who are in it know there is a better life than the one they are living. I shall never forget when the demand for rates was knocking at our door. We could have managed to pay the high rental, but when the rates came on top of it, it plunged our household into absolute misery.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.

I was born poor, I have lived poor, I wish to die poor.

What a miserable thing it is to be poor.

From my novel Seaside Daisies:

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted
is the most terrible poverty

He knew what poverty means. The chilling of brain and heart, the unnerving of the hands, the slow gathering about one of fear and shame and impotent wrath, the dread feeling of helplessness, of the world’s base indifference. Poverty! Poverty!

Poverty is a terrible thing when it bows to the very ground the pride of the strong man—a terrible thing when it leaves old age destitute: till, the strong man may yet redeem his fortunes, and that old age may have had enjoyment while it was capable of enjoying. But a child, with the step slow from weakness, which from its age should be so buoyant; a cheek thin and white from hunger, at a period which especially cares for food (for all children are greedy); a form shrivelled with cold; a growth stopped by work too laborious for such tender years; a spirit broken by toil, want, and harshness; —is not such a child poverty's most miserable spectacle? It is, however, a common one.

There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness, and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.

Loneliness is the most terrible form of poverty.