I present a collection of phrases, greed quotes and aphorisms about avarice.
Greed quotes and sayings
Table of Contents
What is avarice? It is a continuous living in misery for fear of misery.
(Bernardo di Chiaravalle)
Epitaph on a plaque in a Scottish cemetery: Here lies Fred Mc Guire. A penny fell: he died in the fray.
(Marcel Archard)
The greatest pleasure for a miser is to give up a pleasure.
(Gottfried Benn)
Greed in old age is senseless: what could be more absurd than accumulating supplies for the trip when we are close to the destination?
(Marco Tullio Cicerone)
The miser is undoubtedly a madman: what is the sense of living as a poor man to die as a rich man?
(Tenth Juvenile Junius)
All that stuff he had made, with his hands and his head, with not sleeping at night, with taking a fever from heart pounding or malaria, with fatigue from dawn to evening, and going around, under the sun and in the rain, by wearing down his boots and mules – he alone did not wear out thinking about his stuff […] when someone is like this, it means that he is made for stuff
(Giovanni Verga)
It seems that for many the greatest desire is to be the richest in the cemetery.
(Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland)
The miser spends more in a single day than he did in ten years; and his heir spends more in ten months than he has been able to do throughout his life.
(Jean de La Bruyère)
There is no stingy who does not intend to make a huge expense one day; but death comes and makes the heir carry out his plans.
(Voltaire)
When they told him it was time to leave his stuff, to think of the soul, he went out into the courtyard like a madman, staggering, and he was killing his ducks and his turkeys with stick strokes, and screamed: ‘My stuff, come with myself!’.
(Giovanni Verga)
It was so mean that when he heard of the sales at the Funeral Home, he committed suicide!
(Anonymous)
As is well known, greed has a wolf’s hunger and the more you gain weight the more you become insatiable.
(Nikolai Gogol)
Greed is like fire: the more wood you put in, the more it burns.
(Anonymous)
Avarice like envy is an unpopular sin: not for the spread, which is far superior to that of lust (practiced only by a few devotees), but for the reticence of sinners, ready to admit excesses of gluttony and anger , but rarely willing to recognize a weakness which is the secret engine of almost all their actions
(Giuseppe Pontiggia)
The verb “to give” is so much to hate that he never says “I give you a good day”, but “… I lend it to you”.
(Molière)
Avarice. She is so foolish that she can’t even count.
(Charles-Louis de Montesquieu)
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Greed is a vice that can be misleading because it initially takes on the appearance of a virtue.
(Tenth Juvenile Junius)
Poverty lacks many things, all avarice.
(Publilio Siro)
There is only one way to throw your money away: don’t spend it.
(Mirko Badiale)
Greed is the stupidest of capital vices because it enjoys a possibility, or if you prefer a power, which is never realized. The money accumulated by the miser, in fact, has in itself the power to purchase all things, but this power must not be exercised, because otherwise you no longer have the money and therefore the power connected to it.
(Umberto Galimberti)
Greed takes away the pleasure of spending, but gives us that of not spending.
(Roberto Gervaso)
The miser feels together all the worries of the rich and all the torments of the poor.
greed quotes by (Albert Guinon)
There are poorly accommodated people, forced to sleep on uncomfortable beds, badly dressed and even worse fed, who suffer the rigors of the seasons, spontaneously deprive themselves of the attendance of men by spending their days in solitude, suffer from the present, the past, the future, who live life as a continuous penance and have thus found the secret to going to their own ruin through the most painful path: they are the misers.
(Jean de La Bruyère)
The stingy man’s cancellation is that he can’t get into the piggy bank slot.
greed quotes by (Dino Basili)
The misers are unpleasant contemporaries, but very welcome ancestors.
(Victor de Kowa)
The miser is like the pig, which is good after death.
(Proverb)
Greed is the only vice that, in the eyes of posterity, turns into virtue.
(Martin Held)
Miser. Extremely eager to keep what other good people would love to achieve.
greed quotes by (Ambrose Bierce)
They ask you back the € 2 they had loaned you for the machines and then they have:
– iPhoneX
– T-Shirt from € 150
– Rolex
– A friend less
(Anonymous)
Some misers try to become prodigal, and first of all to show it. Their efforts acquire an athletic character: when they take out their money, it seems that they have to lift heavy iron dumbbells, which they then pull on others’ heads. Some are desperate for the increase in prices that concern them, so that their avarice appears increasingly justified, and day after day they buy less and less. They soon go around like miserable shadows; they take the place of the poor, but these poor are despised with reason.
(Elias Canetti)
Greed is the root of all evils.
(Proverb)
Greed is always on the verge of death, all things for it are transformed into the twig to which it attaches itself in the anguish of agony. Greed everywhere sees the bottom of the box, for it the world is worn out from the beginning. It is always broke.
(Walter Benjamin)
Maladetta sie tu, ancient she-wolf,
who more than all the other beasts have prey
for your hunger without sombre end!
(Dante Alighieri)
It was said of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, who never put dots on the “i” to save ink.
greed quotes by (Horace Walpole)
The Scots use the condom three times: the first on the straight, the second on the reverse, and the third as chewing gum.
(Anonymous)
The misers wear a beard so as not to buy the tie.
greed quotes by (Jean Charles)
Who was the inventor of the puzzle? A Genoese when a thousand lire fell into his blender.
(Anonymous)
He was so stingy that when he sent the dress to the dry cleaner he hid two pairs of socks in his pockets.
(Anonymous)
The miser becomes rich by showing that he is poor, while the prodigal is impoverished by showing that he is rich.
(William Shenstone)
The prodigal is arrogant, the miser is mean. Pettyness is better than arrogance.
(Confucius, Dialogues)
I’m not stingy, just lousy. In Naples, all those who suffer from spending rather modest amounts are called lousy. Maybe over five thousand euros don’t mind, but under fifty euros they suffer like beasts.
(Luciano De Crescenzo)
I am stingy and in order not to notice it I am ruining myself. Whenever I go to lunch with friends I always want to be the one who pays for everyone.
(Luciano De Crescenzo)
To live with the misers, even if only for a trip, it is necessary to identify with their reactions. It’s not easy. I had devised a small system years ago. I mentally multiplied all the prices by three and so I could see them as they saw them. No normal person would renounce the purchase of a guide because the price is ten thousand lire. However, if it becomes thirty thousand, some reflection would be justified, which in the miser invariably turns into a refusal
(Giuseppe Pontiggia)
Greed will prevent a man from ending up in misery, but generally it makes him too scary to allow him to become rich.
(Thomas Paine)
The miser’s thoughts are heavy and bruised like the metal he loves.
greed quotes by (Niccolò Tommaseo)
Men hate what they call stingy just because they can’t get away with it.
(Voltaire)
Greed is the most sensual form of chastity.
(Ennio Flaiano)
Greed begins where poverty ends.
(Honoré de Balzac)
When all sins are old, avarice is still young.
(Proverb)
Being stingy means stealing from others, squandering means stealing from oneself and others.
(Paolo Mantegazza)
The miser spends the bare minimum: the prodigal, all the superfluous.
(Roberto Gervaso)
The generous is as prodigal as the stingy thrifty.
greed quotes by (Roberto Gervaso)
Even prodigal people become, with a miser, careful, suddenly attentive to the distribution of expenses.
(Giuseppe Pontiggia)
The thrifty is the richest of men, the miser the poorest.
(Nicolas de Chamfort)
One of the first effects of female beauty on a man is to remove his avarice.
(Italo Svevo)
I praise frugality. That choice which is neither poverty nor avarice.
(Fragmentarius)