S'il est vrai que l'on soit pauvre par toutes les choses que l'on désire, l'ambitieux et l'avare languissent dans une extrême pauvreté.

Translation: Poverty wants few things, avarice everything.

Poverty is the lack of many things, but avarice is the lack of all things.

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.

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

because complacency, or worse, arrogance, is a parent of poverty.

Poverty is a state of mind.

the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy ... betrays a poverty of ambition.

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.

Poverty and adversity is the cause of the soul’s rebellion, revolt, and the gravity of dismay.

The stinting poverty in which they lived was unbearable; it was destroying them. It did not mean that there was not enough to eat: it meant that every penny must be watched, new clothes foregone, amusements abandoned, holidays kept in the never-never-land of the future. A poverty that allows a tiny margin for spending, but which is shadowed always by a weight of debt that nags like a conscience, is worse than starvation itself. That was how she had come to feel. And it was bitter because it was a self imposed poverty.

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.

There is no greater poverty than oblivion to self and others.