C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Miser
Avarice is the miser’s dream.
A mere madness, to live like a wretch, and die rich.
The miser robs himself.
O cursed hunger of pernicious gold!
Groan under gold, yet weep for want of bread.
A miser grows rich by seeming poor; an extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich.
He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.
Misers mistake gold for their good; whereas it is only the means of obtaining it.
History tells us of illustrious villains, but there never was an illustrious miser.
The life of a miser is a play of which we applaud only the closing scene.
Misers, as death approaches, are heaping up a chest of reasons to stand in more awe of him.
The miser, poor fool, not only starves his body, but also his own soul.
The cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.
Of all the vices, avarice is the most generally detested; it is the effect of an avidity common to all men; it is because men hate those from whom they can expect nothing. The greedy misers rail at sordid misers.
A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm’s length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!
A thorough miser must possess considerable strength of character to bear the self-denial imposed by his penuriousness. Equal sacrifices, endured voluntarily in a better cause, would make a saint or a martyr.
Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.