Industry is the root of all ugliness.
- Oscar Wilde1
- From Phrases and Philosophies For The Use Of The Young in The Prose of Oscar Wilde, pg. 308 [↩]
Industry is the root of all ugliness.
- Oscar Wilde1
Time is waste of money.
- Oscar Wilde1
The character of girls must depend upon their reading as much as upon the company they keep. Besides the intrinsic pleasure to be derived from solid knowledge, a woman ought to consider it as her best resource against poverty.
- Mrs. Taylor as quoted by Oscar Wilde1
If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.
- Oscar Wilde1
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The god of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
- Oscar Wilde1
rappers nowadays are comedy
the hootin’ and the hollerin’
back and forth with all the arguin’
where you from, who you know,
what you make and what kind of car you in
seems as though you lost sight
of what’s important with the positive
and checks into your bank account
and you up out of poverty
your values is a disarray,
prioritizin’ horribly
unhappy with your riches
’cause your piss poor morally
ignoring all prior advice and forewarnin’
and we might full of ourselves all of a sudden,
aren’t we?
Chorus:
you’re gonna be a shining star
fancy clothes, fancy cars
and then you’ll see
you’re gonna go far
cause everyone knows,
who you are
so live your life
you steady chasing that paper
just live your life
ain’t got no time for no haters
just life your life
no telling where it’ll take ya
just life your life
cause I’m a paper chaser
just living my life,
my life, my life, my life
just living my life,
my life, my life, my life
- T.I ft. Rihanna
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.
- Oscar Wilde1
Surely, said she, there is some magic in wealth, which can thus make persons pay their court to it, when it does not even benefit themselves. How strange it is, that a fool or a knave, with riches, should be treated with more respect by the world, than a good or wise man in poverty!
- Ann Radcliffe1
Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man; real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul there are infinitely precious things that may not be taken from you. Try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you; and try, also, to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.
- Oscar Wilde1
Be comforted, my dear sir; we shall not feel the want of those luxuries which others value so highly, since we never had a taste for them; and poverty cannot deprive us of many consolations. It cannot rob us of the affection we have for each other, or degrade us in our own opinions, or in that of any person whose opinion we ought to value.
[...]
Besides, my dear sir, poverty cannot deprive us of intellectual delights. It cannot deprive you of the comfort of affording me examples of fortitude and benevolence, nor me of the delight of consoling a beloved parent. It cannot deaden our taste for the grand and the beautiful, nor deny us the means of indulging it; for the scenes of nature - those sublime spectacles, so infinitely superior to all artificial luxuries! are open for the enjoyment of the poor as well as of the rich. Of what, then, have we to complain, so long as we are not in want of necessaries? pleasures, such as wealth cannot buy will still be ours. We retain, then, the sublime luxuries of nature, and lose only the frivolous ones of art.
- Ann Radcliffe1