Quotes & Sayings About Beggars

Forty-five years, these people were provided for. Not with much, you understand, but there weren't beggars in the streets or homeless people. Now everyone must figure out a new way to make a living. Selling hats or popcorn or flowers or coffee, there's not much difference. They're scared. — Annie Ward

You obviously don't know what an Old Man of the Sea great wealth is. It is not a fat purse and time to spend it. Its owner finds himself beset on every side, at every hour, wherever he goes, by persistent pleaders, like beggars in Bombay, each demanding that he invest or give away part of his wealth. He becomes suspicious of honest friendship
indeed honest friendship is rarely offered him; those who could have been his friends are too fastidious to be jostled by beggars, too proud to risk being mistaken for one. — Robert A. Heinlein

In practice nobody cares if work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except " Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. — George Orwell

Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent, beggars, vagabonds, petty criminals and others who were unable to fit into society or take care of themselves. It was rare, too, that they were locked up. — Mike Jay

She sings the songs without words Songs that sailors, and blind men, and beggars have heard She knows more of love than the poets can say And her eyes are for something that won't go away. — Harry Chapin

I saw rich beggars and poor beggars, proud beggars and humble beggars, fat beggars and thin beggars, healthy beggars and sick beggars, whole beggars and crippled beggars, wise beggars and stupid beggars. I saw amateur beggars and professional beggars. A professional beggar is a beggar who begs for a living. — William, Saroyan

Writers are nothing but beggars with a good line. — Charles Bukowski

The Good News of the gospel of grace cries out: We are all, equally, privileged but unentitled beggars at the door of God's mercy! — Brennan Manning

A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family. — Philippa Gregory

And how did little Tim behave?" asked Mrs Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart's content.
"As good as gold," said Bob, "and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see. — Charles Dickens

There are two kinds of beggars: poor beggars and rich beggars, but they are all beggars. Even your kings and your queens are beggars. Only those people, very few people who have stood alone in their being, in their clarity, in their light, who have found their own light, who have found their own flowering, who have found their own space they can call their home, their eternal home - those few people are the emperors. This whole universe is their empire. They don't need to conquer it; it is already conquered. By knowing yourself you have conquered it. — Osho

For Democrats to reduce women to beggars for cheap government-funded birth control is demeaning to the women that I know who are far more complicated than their libido and the management of their reproductive system. — Mike Huckabee

Dr. Martin Luther King put it like this: "We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside . . . but one day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved."23 — Shane Claiborne

The problem for most of us is that the cup has holes, so love goes out just as easily as it goes in. What happens when people are living in the unconditional state of love, however, is that they recognize they are the ocean of love; they know it's their essence. And they naturally overflow in this love. So instead of being love beggars, they become love philanthropists. — Marci Shimoff

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on. — George Bernard Shaw

Venice appeared to me as in a recurring dream, a place once visited and now fixed in memory like images on a photographer's plates so that my return was akin to turning the leaves of a portfolio: a scene of the gondolas moored by the railway station; the Grand Canal in twilight; the Rialto bridge; the Piazza San Marco; the shimmering, rippling wonderland; the bustling water traffic; the fish market; the Lido beach and boardwalk; Teeny in the launch; the singing, gesturing gondoliers; the bourgeois tourists drinking coffee at Florian's; the importunate beggars; the drowned girl's ghost haunting the Bridge of Sighs; the pigeons, mosquitoes and fetor of decay. — Gary Inbinder

I will not say, as the beggars at our door used to do, 'I'll never ask anything of Him again;' but, on the contrary, 'He shall hear oftener from me than ever,' and I will love God the better, and love prayer the better, as long as I live. — Philip Henry

If we have forgotten our total dependency upon God, then there is nothing left for us but to try to depend upon other people's attention to us, because without such attention we don't even feel like human beings. Instead of paying attention to God, we become beggars for the attention of others, constantly trying to make them pity us or look up to us. But this is not true human relatedness, only mutual idolatry. — Charles Upton

We are mortgaging ourselves to foreigners on a scale that would make George Washington cry. Every day - every single day - we borrow a billion dollars from foreigners to buy petroleum from abroad, often from countries that hate us. We are the beggars of the world, financing our lavish lifestyle by selling our family heirlooms and by enslaving our progeny with the need to service the debt. — Ben Stein

Beggars should be no choosers. — John Heywood

The Eleven is not a painting of History, it is History. Perhaps what Michelet saw at the end of the Flore pavilion was History in person, in eleven persons - in terror, because History is pure terror. And that terror attracts us like a magnet. Because we are men, Sir; and because men high and low, scholars and beggars, passionately love History, that is, the terrors and the massacres; they hasten from afar to contemplate them, the terrors and the massacres, under the pretext of deploring them, even of rectifying them, so they claim, the good creatures... — Pierre Michon

On the other hand he tried to point out to her that she shouldn't give money to the beggars in the street, as they'd only buy schnapps with it. But she kept doing it. "They can do what they like with the money," she said. When Ove protested she just smiled and took his big hands in hers and kissed them, explaining that when a person gives to another person it's not just the receiver who's blessed. It's the giver. — Fredrik Backman

In my world death was like a nameless and incomprehensible hand, a door-to-door salesman who took away mothers, beggars, or ninety year old neighbors, like a hellish lottery. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I'll be living quietly in a house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I'll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories. — Fernando Pessoa

New York is a place where the rich walk, the poor drive Cadillac's, and the beggars die of malnutrition with thousands of dollars hidden in their mattresses. — Duke Ellington

I still know in my heart that it is a Godless, dirty game; that love is bitter and all there is, and that the rest is for the emotional beggars of the earth and is about the equivalent of people who stimulate themselves with dirty post cards- — Zelda Fitzgerald

I love playing all kinds of roles. I hope it doesn't sound too pretentious, but I always feel human nature is like a piano, and there are 88 keys, and there are some white keys and some black keys, and each character is a different chord on the piano. Basically, I hope that in the course of my life, I will have played all 88 keys. So, I'll have played heroes and villains and princes and kings and warriors and beggars and thieves and lovers and fathers and wizards and all of those things. That is why I'm an actor ... I love studying people. — Tom Hiddleston

-Fiona, this is my mate, Frank Begbie. Or Franco. Or Beggars. Or the Beggar Boy. Or the Generalissmo. Or Psychotic Bullying Prick. — Irvine Welsh

Why give them a proper burning?" Rulf caught the lad by the arm. "Because if we beat beggars here, we're no better than beggars. If we beat great men, we're greater still. — Joe Abercrombie

A Christian who does not pray is like prince in beggars clothes who stands but a few inches from His father's throne and yet does not ask. — Paul Washer

Look at that crowd', he said disgustedly. 'They think it's a circus.'
'And not a single coin are they donating', said Dina.
'That's not surprising. Pity can only be shown in small doses. When so many beggars are in one place, the public goes like this' - he put his fists to his eyes, like binoculars. — Rohinton Mistry

A child dragging bent useless legs is crawling up the hill outside the village. Nose to the stones, goat dung, and muddy trickles, she pulls herself along like a broken cricket. We falter, ashamed of our strong step, and noticing this, she gazes up, clear-eyed, without resentment - it seems much worse that she is pretty. In Bengal, GS says stiffly, beggars will break their children's knees to achieve this pitiable effect for business purposes: this is his way of expressing his distress. But the child that lies here at our boots is not a beggar; she is merely a child, staring in curiosity at tall, white strangers. I long to give her something - a new life? - yet am afraid to tamper with such dignity. And so I smile as best I can, and say "Namas-te!" "Good morning!" How absurd! And her voice follows as we go away, a small clear smiling voice - "Namas-te!" - a Sanskrit word for greeting and parting that means, "I salute you". — Peter Matthiessen

Do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is ... that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men's oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia? Can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it. — Thomas Dekker

In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins. — Don DeLillo

But for most practical purposes Tarbean had two pieces: Waterside and Hillside. Waterside is where people are poor. That makes them beggars, thieves, and whores. Hillside is where people are rich. That makes them solicitors, politicians, and courtesans. I — Patrick Rothfuss

In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance. — Virginia Woolf

Those dear to me took fright for my safety and, perhaps, my sanity. Kings, they explained, do not walk like beggars for hundreds of miles. My response was that if a beggar could managed the feat, then why not a king? Did they think me less capable than a beggar?
Sometimes I think that I am. The beggar knows much that the king can only guess. And yet who draws up the codes for begging ordinances? Often I wonder what my experience in life
my easy life following the Desolation, and my current level of comfort
has given me of any true experience to use in making laws. If we had to rely on what we knew, kings would only be of use in creating laws regarding the proper heating of tea and the cushioning of thrones. — Brandon Sanderson

Unless the old adage must be verified, That beggars mounted, run their horse to death. — William Shakespeare

Don't be so sily, Philippa," the marchioness said, "Lord Castleton is an earl. Beggars cannot be choosers." Penelope gritted her teeth at the adage, her mother's favorite when discussing her unmarried daughters' prospects. Pippa turned her blue gaze on her mother. "I was not aware that I was begging. — Sarah MacLean

Perhaps some have created their own difficulties but don't the rest of us do exactly the same things? Are we not all beggars? — Jeffrey R. Holland

If wishes were fishes, even beggars would eat — Lili St. Crow

The traditional Chinese kingdoms operated under centuries of constraints on commerce. The building of walls on their borders had been a way of limiting such trade and literally keeping the wealth of the nation intact and inside the walls. For such administrators, giving up trade goods was the same as paying tribute to their neighbors, and they sought to avoid it as much as they could. The Mongols directly attacked the Chinese cultural prejudice that ranked merchants as merely a step above robbers by officially elevating their status ahead of all religions and professions, second only to government officials. In a further degradation of Confucian scholars, the Mongols reduced them from the highest level of traditional Chinese society to the ninth level, just below prostitutes but above beggars. — Jack Weatherford

Grace finds us beggars but leaves us debtors. — Augustus Toplady

rich people are coming to regard men and women who apply to them for help for worthy objects, not as beggars, but as agents for doing their work. — Booker T. Washington

The greatest of men must turn beggars when they have to do with Christ. — Matthew Henry

If you write a lovely story about India, you're criticized for selling an exotic version of India. And if you write critically about India, you're seen as portraying it in a negative light - it also seems to be a popular way to present India, sort of mangoes and beggars. — Kiran Desai

Oh, the spectacles - I have to wear them when I go abroad, I have such kind eyes you see, beggars and things cluster round and annoy me. — Nancy Mitford

We shall not lie on our backs at the Red Castle and watch the vultures wheeling over the valley where they killed the grandson of Genghiz. We will not read Babur's memoirs in his garden at Istalif and see the blind man smelling his way around the rose bushes. Or sit in the Peace of Islam with the beggars of Gazar Gagh. We will not stand on the Buddha's head at Bamiyan, upright in his niche like a whale in a dry-dock. We will not sleep in the nomad tent, or scale the Minaret of Jam. And we shall lose the tastes - the hot, coarse, bitter bread; the green tea flavoured with cardamoms; the grapes we cooled in the snow-melt; and the nuts and dried mulberries we munched for altitude sickness. Nor shall we get back the smell of the beanfields, the sweet, resinous smell of deodar wood burning, or the whiff of a snow leopard at 14,000 feet. — Bruce Chatwin

Of course, I didn't know how I felt about my first kiss coming from one of the undead, but hey, beggars can't be choosers, and let me tell you something, Jesse was way cuter than any live guy I'd met lately. — Meg Cabot

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked. — Thomas B. Macaulay

In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. — George Orwell

To many an upright poor person, it seems needless to invent a god who will wash the feet of beggars and exalt those who do not care to labor. What is this but a denial of thrift and a sickly obsession with the victim? The so-called common people are quite able to penetrate this ruse ("The good lord must indeed love the poor, since he made so many of them"). Many decent people are made uneasy by the constant injunction to give alms and to dwell among those who have lost their self-respect. They can also see the hook sticking out of the bait: abandon this useless life, leave your family, and follow the prophet who says that the world is soon to pass away. Such an injunction coupled with an implicit or explicit "or else" is repulsive to many conservatives who believe in self-reliance and personal integrity, and who distrust "charity," just as it was repulsive to the early socialists who did not think that poverty was an ideal or romantic or ennobled state. — Christopher Hitchens

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with 'opportunities' by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS. — Mark Cantrell

I desire to go to Hell and not to Heaven. In the former I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks and apostles. — Niccolo Machiavelli

We live by action - by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want - whether geniuses or beggars - are related by impotence. — Fernando Pessoa

Great minds tend toward banality. It is the noblest effort of individualism. But it implies a sort of modesty, which is so rare that it is scarcely found except in the greatest, or in beggars. — Andre Gide

Perhaps the most difficult task for us to perform is to rely on God's grace and God's grace alone for our celebration. It is difficult for our pride to rest on grace. Grace is for other people - for beggars. We don't want to live by a heavenly welfare system. We want to earn our own way and atone for our own sins. We like to think that we will go to heaven because we deserve to be there. — R.C. Sproul

The poor have little; beggars, none; the rich, too much; enough, not one. — Benjamin Franklin

The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination. — Jon Krakauer

He considered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be ungrateful. He — George Orwell

We show hospitality to strangers not merely because they need it, but because we need it, too. The stranger at the door is the living symbol and memory that we are all strangers here. This is not our house, our table, our food, our lodging; this is God's house and table and food and lodging. We were pilgrims and wanderers, aliens and strangers, even enemies of God, but we, too, were welcomed into this place. To show hospitality to the stranger is, as Gordon Lathrop has observed, to say, We are beggars here together. Grace will surprise us both. — Thomas G. Long

I was out there for 12 days. There are more beggars in Soho than there are in Kabul. — Neil Morrissey

If wishes could be fishes, even beggars would eat. — Lili St. Crow

But strangers and the poor may pluck for themselves the fruit from my tree: that causes less shame. But beggars should be entirely done away with! Truly, it annoys one to give to them and it annoys one not to give to them. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We have moved into an era where we are called upon to raise certain basic questions about the whole society. We are still called upon to give aid to the beggar who finds himself in misery and agony on life's highway. But one day, we must ask the question of whether an edifice which produces beggars must not be restructured and refurbished. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Christ surrounded himself with beggars, prostitutes, tax-collectors and fishermen ... what he meant by this was that the divine spark is in every soul and is never extinguished ... — Paulo Coelho

Choosers will be beggars if the begging's not their choosing. — Garth Nix

Renounce and give up. What did Christ say? "He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." Again and again did he preach renunciation as the only way to perfection. There comes a time when the mind awakes from this long and dreary dream-the child gives up its play and wants to go back to its mother. Renunciation is not asceticism. Are all beggars Christ? Poverty is not a synonym for holiness; often the reverse. — Swami Vivekananda

It is also certain that they are much mistaken that think the poverty of a nation is a mean of the public safety. Who quarrel more than beggars? who does more earnestly long for a change than he that is uneasy in his present circumstances? and who run to create confusions with so desperate a boldness as those who, having nothing to lose, hope to gain by them? — Thomas More

God knows, when spring comes to Paris the humbles mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise ... it [is] the the intimacy with which his eye rests upon the scene. It [is] his Paris. A man does not need to be rich, nor even a citizen, to feel this way about Paris. Paris is filled with poor people - the proudest and filthiest lot of beggars that ever walked the earth ... And yet they give the illusion of being at home. It is that which distinguishes the Parisian from all other metropolitan souls.
When I think of New York I have a very different feeling. New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glisttering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit ... Nobody knows what it's all about. Nobody directs the energy. Stupendous. Bizarre. Baffling. A tremendous reactive urge, but absolutely uncoordinated. — Henry Miller

A court is an assembly of noble and distinguished beggars. — Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

I feel ... an ardent desire to see knowledge so disseminated through the mass of mankind that it may, at length, reach even the extremes of society: beggars and kings. — Thomas Jefferson

Having people like that in your service degrades such service, when they are going around the world like beggars." Such was the advice from her Majesty, Empress of the German Empire, on the subject of hiring Wolfgang Mozart. — Robert Spaethling

Taste and smell are often the beggars among our five senses - they leave no written language and therefore no standards other than wholly personal ones. Tasting a superlative Moselle wine can be an aesthetic experience no less genuine than hearing a Mozart piano concerto or seeing for the first time an original Breughel painting. — Frank Schoonmaker

He seems so frivolous and so careless, but he gives money to beggars, not frivolously or carelessly, but because he believes in giving money to beggars, and giving it to them "where they stand".
He says he knows perfectly well all the arguments against giving money to beggars. But he finds those to be precisely the arguments for giving money to them. If beggars are lazy or deceptive or wanting a drink, he knows only too well his own lack of motivation, his own dishonesty, his own thirst.
He doesn't believe in "scientific charity" because that is too easy, as easy as writing a check. He believes in "promiscuous charity" because that is really difficult. "It means the most dark and terrible of all human actions - talking to a man. In fact, I know of nothing more difficult than really talking to the poor men we meet." (pp. 13-14) — Dale Ahlquist

It turns out we were some people
which has been chosen by God to be happy in a different way
# beggars — Ys Sroyer

If wishes were horses," she murmured, "beggars would ride. — Jennifer Haymore

Mr. Baggins saw then how clever Gandalf had been. The interruptions had really made Beorn more interested in the story, and the story had kept him from sending the dwarves off at once like suspicious beggars. He never invited people into his house, if he could help it. He had very few friends and they lived a good way away; and he never invited more than a couple of these to his house at a time. Now he had got fifteen strangers sitting in his porch! — Anonymous

We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions to a hell that beggars the imagination. A profound change in attitude has come about as a result. — Brian W. Aldiss

Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, "When a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children." She exclaimed, "You are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars]." But Rabbi Hiyya replied, "There is a wheel which revolves in this world." - Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b — Joseph Telushkin

Actors are superstitious about beggars, perhaps because we're largely in the same line. — Valerie Martin

JOHNNY: Friends! Outcasts. Leeches. Undesirables. A blessing on you, and upon this beggars' banquet. This day we draw a line in the chalk, and push back against the bastard pitiless busybody council, and drive them from this place for ever. I, Rooster Byron, your merciless ruler, have decreed that today all my bounty is bestowed upon you, gratis. There will be free booze, bangers, draw, whizz and whatnot, for all the minions of my kingdom. — Jez Butterworth

At this time of day it should have been open and full of fifty fellow smackheads, crackheads, psychotics, epileptics, schizophrenics, self-harmers, beggars, buskers, car thieves, sherry pushers, ciderheads, just-released-that-morning convicts, ex-army, ex-married-men-with-young-children-who'd-discovered-their-wife-in-bed-with-two-members-of-the-university-rowing-team-at-the-same-time. — Alexander Masters

I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know? — Emmanuel Jal

It seemed too as if many of the people were on display, behaving as if they expected to be looked at, as if they were on show: so many of them seemed to be wearing costumes, not just policemen and firemen and waiters and shop assistants, but people in their going-to-work costumes, their I'm-a-mother-pushing-a-pram costumes, babies and children in outfits that were like costumes; workers digging holes in their costume-bright orange vests; joggers in jogging costume; even the drinkers in the streets and parks, even the beggars, seemed to be wearing costumes, uniforms. — John Lanchester

Beggars remind us that not all miseries arise from our ideas. — Mason Cooley

He makes a beggar first that first relieves him;
Not us'rers make more beggars where they live
Than charitable men that use to give. — John Heywood

Jesus is deeply connected to the earth on which he walks. He observes the forces of nature, learns from them, teaches about them, and reveals that the God of Creation is the same God who sent him to give good news to the poor, sight to the blind, and freedom to the prisoners. He walks from village to village, sometimes alone and sometimes with others; as he walks, he meets the poor, the beggars, the blind, the sick, the mourners, and those who have lost hope. He listens attentively to those with whom he walks, and he speaks to them with the authority of a true companion on the road. He remains very close to the ground. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

Pilate, as the histories reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on a slip of papyrus. The notion that he would even be in the same room as Jesus, let alone deign to grant him a "trial," beggars the imagination. Either the threat posed by Jesus to the stability of Jerusalem is so great that he is one of only a handful of Jews to have the opportunity to stand before Pilate and answer for his alleged crimes, or else the so-called trial before Pilate is pure legend. — Reza Aslan

O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's. — William Shakespeare

We, the beggar class, have little to lose and our expectations are, at best, modest, and when we suffer, it seems we suffer to the depths, for there is nothing in our lives nor in our souls to buoy our hope. Nothing in the way of the blackness. It sinks to the bottom as the lead weight that is despair. We look forward such a short distance that our spirit is myopic, not to be corrected by any lens within our world. — Dan Groat

Those who say nothing about their poverty will obtain more than those who turn beggars. — Horace

When I was 17, I went to India for six weeks and had what, at the time, was a very challenging trip. You walk down the street and you see lepers and beggars, and there were several of us, a group of Americans. I remember we were just trying to park one night somewhere and people were just sleeping in the parking lot. — Chris Hughes

Photography is without mercy
though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men. — Nick Harkaway

After applying to hundreds of scholarships I finally felt that we are also beggars, no different than others, we are not on the street, uneducated, but we are sitting in front of computers with years of hardworking and repeatedly begging each and everyone to sponsor and support our education, not because we deserve, but we cannot afford. — M.F. Moonzajer

Well, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. — Robert Jordan

Beggars inspired me with mingled feelings of love and fear. I knew that I ought to be kind to them, for they might not be what they seemed. — Elie Wiesel

It was a cruel world though. More than half of all children died before they could reach maturity, thanks to chronic epidemics and malnutrition. People dropped like flies from polio and tuberculosis and smallpox and measles. There probably weren't many people who lived past forty. Women bore so many children, they became toothless old hags by the time they were in their thirties. People often had to resort to violence to survive. Tiny children were forced to do such heavy labor that their bones became deformed, and little girls were forced to become prostitutes on a daily basis. Little boys too, I suspect. Most people led minimal lives in worlds that had nothing to do with richness of perception or spirit. City streets were full of cripples and beggars and criminals. Only a small fraction of the population could gaze at the moon with deep feeling or enjoy a Shakespeare play or listen to the beautiful music of Dowland. — Haruki Murakami

Upstairs, it's 18th century England, where farming out the poor meant lumping the blind, crippled, insane, epileptic, deaf and dumb in almshouses with criminals because The History of the Poor Laws was designed to discourage mendacity, wherein anyone giving alms to beggars was put in jail . . ." In other words, little has changed - many still believed there's no distinction between tolerating the suffering of others and causing it. — Philip Schultz