I have a tremendous love of frugality, I must admit. I don’t like a couch decked out ostentatiously; or clothes brought out from a chest or given a sheen by the forceful pressure of weights and a thousand mangles, but homely and inexpensive, and not hoarded to be donned with fuss and bother. I like food which is not prepared and watched over by the household slaves, not ordered many days in advance nor served by a multitude of hands, but readily obtainable and easy to deal with, nothing in it out of the way or expensive, available everywhere, not heavy on the purse or the body, and not destined to come back by the same way it entered.
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
Category: AVARICE & ALMSGIVING & MINIMALISM
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In case you think I am simply using the teaching of philosophers to make light of the trials of poverty, which no one feels to be a burden unless he thinks it that, first consider that by far the greater proportion of men are poor, but you will not see them looking at all more gloomy and anxious than the rich. In fact, I rather suspect that they are happier in proportion as their minds have less to harry them.
—Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
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Just as there are boxes everywhere to put money in, so there should be bowls of money everywhere. Everything would be free, people would go to the theatre free, have free access to the streetwalkers, take free drives to the park, be buried free of charge, have someone speak over their coffin free of charge; for when one always has money in hand everything is in a sense gratis. No one need own property.
Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
Søren Kierkegaard -
I do not think I am doing anything unworthy of my pen by recommending here that one take good care of keeping his fortune, whether inherited or acquired. For to possess enough to be able, even if one is alone and without a family, to live comfortably in true independence, that is, without working, is a priceless advantage: it grants one exemption and immunity from the miseries and torment attached to human life, as well as emancipation from the general chores which are the natural fate of the children of the earth. It is only by this favour of fate that one is truly a free born man, and really sui juris (his own master), master of his time and his powers, and able to say every morning: ‘The day belongs to me’. Also, between the man who has a thousand pounds of income and the man who has a hundred thousand, the difference is infinitely less than between the former and the man who has nothing. But inherited wealth achieves its highest value when it falls to the one who, endowed with superior intellectual powers, pursues enterprises that are not really compatible with having to earn one’s bread: he is then doubly favoured by fate and can live in full accord with his genius. He will pay his debt to humankind a hundred times over by producing what no one else could produce and giving it what will become its common good, while at the same time making it honourable. Another, placed in such a favoured position, will render himself worthy of humankind by his philanthropic works. Whoever, on the contrary, does nothing of this kind, who does not even try, if only once, as an experiment, to advance a science through serious studies, and does not give himself even the smallest opportunity of doing so, is merely a contemptible idler.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’In the Presence of Schopenhauer
Michel Houellebecq -
What a man is for himself, what keeps him company in solitude and that no one can give him or take from him, is obviously more important to him than what he can possess, or what he can be in the eyes of others. A man of wit, even in the deepest solitude, will find in his own thoughts and fantasies a perfect distraction, while the continual change brought about by society, plays, excursions and parties will be quite unable to ward off the boredom that tortures the fool.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’
In the Presence of Schopenhauer
Michel Houellebecq -
Health, above all, is so much more important than all external goods that, in truth, a healthy beggar is happier than a sick king. A calm and serene temperament, based on perfect health and a happy organization, a lucid, lively, penetrating and right-thinking reason, a tempered and gentle will that produces a good conscience, these are advantages that no wealth, no rank can replace.
—Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’
In the Presence of Schopenhauer
Michel Houellebecq -
From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.
Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.
This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus by inflaming the horror of the Same Old Thing we have recently made the Arts, for example, less dangerous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride.
The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis
SO GOOD QUOTES 