A Quote by Seneca the Younger

The greatest wealth is a poverty of desires. — © Seneca the Younger
The greatest wealth is a poverty of desires.
The form of law which I propose would be as follows: In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues-not faction, but rather distraction-there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty nor, again, excessive wealth, for both are productive of great evil . . . Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or of wealth.
Let us look at wealth and poverty. The affluent society and the deprived society inter-are. The wealth of one society is made of the poverty of the other. "This is like this, because that is like that." Wealth is made of non-wealth elements, and poverty is made by non-poverty elements. [...] so we must be careful not to imprison ourselves in concepts. The truth is that everything contains everything else. We cannot just be, we can only inter-be. We are responsible fo everything that happens around us.
If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman.
Poverty doesn't come because of the decrease of wealth but because of the increase of desires.
Gratitude and Contentment is the greatest worker of miracles. It transforms water into wine, grains of sand into pearls, raindrops into balsam, poverty into wealth, the smallest into the greatest, the most common to the most noble, earth into paradise.
When you read Marx (or Jesus) this way, you come to see that real wealth is not material wealth and real poverty is not just the lack of food, shelter, and clothing. Real poverty is the belief that the purpose of life is acquiring wealth and owning things. Real wealth is not the possession of property but the recognition that our deepest need, as human beings, is to keep developing our natural and acquired powers to relate to other human beings.
Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.
We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.
There are no causes of poverty. To ask what causes poverty is like asking what causes coldit is the absence of energy. Similarly poverty is the absence of wealth. We should ask, ‘what are the causes of wealth?’
There is a saying in Tibetan that "at the door of the miserable rich man sleeps the contented beggar". The point of this saying is not that poverty is a virtue, but that happiness does not come with wealth, but from setting limits to one's desires, and living within those limits with satisfaction.
Contrary to age-old prejudices, the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but helps to alleviate that poverty.
My dream is for Malawi to be poverty-free, and I intend to eradicate poverty through economic growth and wealth creation.
If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.
The greatest wealth of this nation is not only the mergers of giant corporations or the possibility of further globalization of the infrastructure of the world. In the United States, our greatest single source of wealth is the minds and talent of our young people. Not to use it is stupid - to waste it is a crime.
Pope Francis emphatically does not buy the argument that poverty can be alleviated by the 'trickle down' effects of wealth creation. He is deaf to arguments that the global economy has brought a billion people out of poverty. He is convinced, in short, that the best and only way to expel poverty is fairer distribution of the world's goods.
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