Agnes Repplier Quotes

CLOSE-FISTED, adj. Unduly desirous of keeping that which many meritorious persons wish to obtain.

[Meanness] is more ingrained in man's nature than Prodigality; the mass of mankind are avaricious rather than open-handed.

Avarice, the sphincter of the heart.

I'm very cheap. My friends hate me.

The ruling Passion of the Dutchman is Avarice. Of literature they know nothing, and they are seldom seen with a book.

The miser and the glutton are two facetious buzzards: one hides his store, and the other stores his hide.

Avarice is always poor.

The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.

The character of covetousness, is what a man generally acquires more through some niggardliness or ill grace in little and inconsiderable things, than in expenses of any consequence.

Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.

The miser is as much in want of what he has as of what he has not.

While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

A man that hoards up riches and enjoys them not, is like an ass that carries gold and eats thistles.

Fear will make you stingy.

The only thing wider than my family's mean streak is my family's cheap streak.

When a miser contents himself with giving nothing, and saving what he has got, and is in other respects guilty of no injustice, he is, perhaps, of all bad men the least injurious to society; the evil he does is properly nothing more than the omission of the good he might do. If, 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.

The covetous man heaps up riches, not to enjoy them, but to have them; and starves himself in the midst of plenty, and most unnaturally cheats and robs himself of that which is his own; and makes a hard shift, to be as poor and miserable with a great estate, as any man can be without it.

The miser robs himself.

The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

A penny saved is twopence dear; A pin a day 's a groat a year.

The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.

A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.

Herbert used to say that he was as tight as the paper on the wall.

I knew once a very covetous, sordid fellow [perhaps William Lowndes], who used to say, 'Take care of the pence, for the pounds will take care of themselves.