Luxury quotes
1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside luxury — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"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."
"Among the numerous luxuries of the table...coffee may be considered as one of the most valuable. It excites cheerfulness without intoxication; and the pleasing flow of spirits which it occasions...is never followed by sadness, languor or debility."
"The best taxes are such as are levied upon consumptions, especially those of luxury; because such taxes are least felt by the people. They seem, in some measure, voluntary; since a man may choose how far he will use the commodity: They naturally produce sobriety and frugality, if judiciously imposed: And being confounded with the natural price of the commodity, they are scarcely perceived by the consumers. Their only disadvantage is that they are expensive in the levying."
"What is bad about luxury as long as you can afford it?"
"The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury."
"Greatness of spirit is to bear finely both good fourtune and bad, honor and disgrace, and not to think highly of luxury or attention or power or victories in contests, and to possess a certain depth and magnitude of spirit."
"I'm happy when I can spend every day doing the things that I like to do. That's my luxury."
"There is a luxury in self-dispraise; And inward self-disparagement affords To meditative spleen a grateful feast."
"Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however - that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc"
"The compensation for a death sentence is the knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned."
"Those vices [luxury and neglect of decent manners] are vices of men, not of the times. [Lat., Hominum sunt ista [vitia], non temporum."
"Poverty wants some, luxury many, and avarice all things."
"It is a luxury to learn; but the luxury of learning is not to be compared with the luxury of teaching."
"Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up."
"The luxury of one's own opinion."
"So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent."
"We read on the foreheads of those who are surrounded by a foolish luxury, that fortune sells what she is thought to give."
"For too long the development debate has ignored the fact that poverty tends to be characterized not only by material insufficiency but also by denial of rights. What is needed is a rights-based approach to development. Ensuring essential political, economic and social entitlements and human dignity for all people provides the rationale for policy. These are not a luxury affordable only to the rich and powerful but an indispensable component of national development efforts."
"The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't."
"Higher education cannot be a luxury reserved just for a privileged few. It is an economic necessity for every family. And every family should be able to afford it."
