Slight was the thing I bought, / Small was the debt I thought, / Poor was the loan at best— / God! but the interest!
I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.
Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.
Let us run up debts. One is nobody without debts.
To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.
One of the greatest disservices you can do a man is to lend him money that he can’t pay back.
All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren’t respectable live beyond other people’s. A few gifted individuals manage to do both.
A good name is still to be preferred to great riches. Especially is it to be preferred to the appearance of riches, acquired with nothing down and nothing to pay for two months.
We all run in debt fer things we wouldn’ think o’ payin’ perfectly good money fer.
Like the heavy judgment of God on the sinner, the bill came.
The consumption-driven mindset masquerades as “quality of life” but eats us from within. It is as if we’ve been invited to a feast, but the table is laid with food that nourishes only emptiness, the black hole of the stomach that never fills.
Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in debt; it is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that costs so much.
If the correct things belonged to you, perhaps you might belong.
The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!—Which it never can be.
The pyramids were built for pharaohs on the happy theory that they could take their stuff with them. Versailles was built for kings on the theory that they should live surrounded by the finest stuff. The Mall of America is built on the premise that we should all be able to afford this stuff. It may be a shallow culture, but it’s by-God democratic.
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
People, one by one as I meet them, I find are wondrous. When you have time to listen and watch them, when you look them in the eyes, you see all the potential of the whole thing, this whole species that has such a wonderful gift that was given by nature. . . . And we’ve wasted it by everyone wanting a fanny pack and to go to the mall and to be paying 18 percent interest on things that we don’t need, don’t want, don’t work, and can’t give back.
We seek fulfillment but settle for abundance. Prisoners of plenty, we have the freedom to consume instead of the freedom to find our place in the world.
More than enough is too much.
