No Debts Quotes & Sayings

True "volunteering," then, obeys no law, seeks no returns, pays no debts, plans no praise for yourself, nor proves your goodness — Walter Wangerin Jr.

There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world. — Allan Bloom

When a man could no longer pay his debts, the soldiers would seize the tabletop he would be using to display his wares (banco) and break it (rotta). Hence, bankruptcy. — Jodi Taylor

Maybe there were times when suicide made sense. When the immoral choice is moral. Emerson could believe that. But his father was no Walter White. He hadn't been terminally ill or struggling with addiction or living a dual life where he'd accrued huge gambling debts that he couldn't pay off. There'd been no sacrifice in his actions. Only weakness. And his pain, however deep it had been, hadn't disappeared with his death. He'd simply passed it on to those who'd loved him. That's what really got to Emerson. The selfishness of it all. — Stephanie Kuehn

My life was a wreck. I had nothing, no material possessions, unless debts counts. Fourteen pairs of shoes that were too small for me was all I had to show after a lifetime of profligate spending. I hadn't a job. I hadn't any qualifications. I'd achieved nothing with my life. I'd never been happy. I had no husband or boyfriend. — Marian Keyes

Greece will not manage to get back on its feet without restructuring its debt. There is no way around it. The country's creditors will have to reduce a portion of its debts by extending maturity dates, lowering interest rates or giving them what's called a 'haircut' in financial jargon. — Peer Steinbruck

Not at Lehman Brothers, which collapsed in 2008, and not on Wall Street; Greece was where the fire broke out. One heard the word contamination again and again, but this time it was no imperial cultural contamination, no creeping process of civilization. This time the crisis was a contagion: debts and obligations that would never be repaid, a gradual deterioration of the financial immune system. — Jason Wilson

That second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker! there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys. Let me live onward; you shall find that, though slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's? — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Presently Arnaud folded the paper napkin, in the same careful way he always folded a table napkin, and said I ought to follow Chantal's suggestion and get a job in teaching a nursery school. (So Maman had mentioned that to Mme. Pons, too) I should teach until I had enough working time behind me to claim a pension. It would be good for me in my old age to have an income of my own. Anything could happen. He could be killed in a train crash or called up for a war. My father could easily be ruined in a lawsuit and die covered with debts. There were advantages to teaching, such as long holidays and reduced train fares.
"How long would it take?" I said. "Before I could stop teaching and get my pension."
"Thirty-five years," said Arnaud. "I'll ask my mother. She had no training, either, but she taught private classes. All you need is a decent background and some recommendations. — Mavis Gallant

Words pay no debts, give her deeds. — William Shakespeare

In the days when money was backed by its face value in silver or gold, there were limits to how much wealth could flow around the world. Today, it's virtual money that the bank lends into existence on a computer screen. "And unless the economy continually expands, there is no new flow of money to pay back that money, plus interest." ... "As it stands now, if banks start loaning money more slowly than they collect debts, the quantity of money in the economy goes down, and it's impossible to pay back debts. So we get defaults on houses ... our economy plunges into misery and unemployment. Under our current monetary system, the only alternative to that is endless growth. So one absolute thing we have to change is the whole nature of the monetary system ... we deny banks the right to create money." ... There's a challenge with that solution, he admits. "You're trying to take the right to create wealth away from some of the wealthiest people on the planet. — Alan Weisman

Our societies appear to be intent on immediate consumption rather than on investment for the future. We are piling up enormous debts and exploiting the natural environment in a manner which suggests that we have no real sense of any worthwhile future. Just as a society which believes in the future saves in the present in order to invest in the future, so a society without belief spends everything now and piles up debts for future generations to settle. "Spend now and someone else will pay later." — Lesslie Newbigin

The promises made by a guilty conscience acknowledge and settle no debts... — Tove Jansson

A man cannot free himself by any self-denying ordinances, neither by water nor potatoes, nor by violent possibilities, by refusing to swear, refusing to pay taxes, by going to jail, or by taking another man's crops or squatting on his land. By none of these ways can he free himself; no, nor by paying his debts with money; only by obedience to his own genius. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Daughter! Get you an honest Man for a Husband, and keep him honest. No matter whether he is rich, provided he be independent. Regard the Honour and moral Character of the Man more than all other Circumstances. Think of no other Greatness but that of the soul, no other Riches but those of the Heart. An honest, Sensible humane Man, above all the Littlenesses of Vanity, and Extravagances of Imagination, labouring to do good rather than be rich, to be usefull rather than make a show, living in a modest Simplicity clearly within his Means and free from Debts or Obligations, is really the most respectable Man in Society, makes himself and all about him the most happy. — John Adams

Will the adoption of this new plan pay our debts! This, Sir, is a plain question. It is inferred, that our grievances are to be redressed, and the evils of the existing system to be removed by the new Constitution. Let me inform the Honorable Gentleman, that no nation ever paid its debts by a change of Government, without the aid of in- dustry. You never will pay your debts but by a radical change of domestic economy ... The evils that attend us, lie in extravagance and want of industry and can only be removed by assiduity and economy. — Patrick Henry

The United States established itself as a trustworthy new nation in its first two decades after the Revolutionary War by paying its debts, even when many in the country believed it had no obligation to do so. Alexander Hamilton, the founder of this newspaper, insisted on it. — John Podhoretz

Forgive Us Our Debts as We Forgive Our Debtors The fifth petition concerns our relationships, both with God and others. Luther, who for years struggled mightily and personally with the issues of guilt and pardon, gives a clarion call to seek God's forgiveness every day in prayer: If anyone insists on his own goodness and despises others . . . let him look into himself when this petition confronts him. He will find he is no better than others and that in the presence of God everyone must duck his head and come into the joy of forgiveness only through the low door of humility.210 — Timothy Keller

You might say those who can't repay their student debts shouldn't have borrowed in the first place. But they had no way of knowing just how bad the jobs market would become. — Robert Reich

Every relationship seems simple at its start. Two people listening to each other, two shells meeting each other, making one world between them. There are no others in the perfect unity of that instant, no other people or things or interests. It is free of ties or claims, unburdened by responsibilities, by worry about the future or debts to the past. And then how swiftly, how inevitably the perfect unity is invaded; the relationship changes; it becomes complicated, encumbered by its contact with the world. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We paid off our debts, we learned some, made friends and returned in 1950 with a larger view of life. I had, however, no home, no income of any kind and no prospects whatsoever. — James W. Black

The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy. It borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours. — Mitch Daniels

High justice would in no way be debased
if ardent love should cancel instantly
the debts these penitents must satisfy. — Dante Alighieri

Life is too short to have debts and doubts,
Pay the bills, no regrets, be up and about. — Ana Claudia Antunes

No matter how flawed someone else may be, that doesn't give us the right to be less than we are, does it? We are decent people and we repay our debts. — Jean Kwok

Yes, it's okay to be afraid. It's okay to hesitate before plunging from your comfort zone.
It's okay to have scars, pimples, insecurities, moles, cellulite, tremors, debts, redness, regrets, loneliness and uncertainty.
It's okay to have no idea what you're doing.
It's okay to struggle with some things, while enjoying others. It's okay to find joy in the beauty in life, even after a great loss. It's okay to change. It's okay to move on. And it's okay to fear changing and moving on.
Wherever you are, and whatever you are experiencing, is okay. You didn't invent the universe and you didn't invent the human condition.
You don't need permission to live whatever you're living, even if it looks and feels different from anyone else's life around you. And it's okay to feel like you need that permission anyway. — Vironika Tugaleva

No," said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with his usually careless and unemphatic speech - "there's debts we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by. While I've been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing - it's too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said about a man's turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to somebody else. — George Eliot

And always, in our highly regularised way of life, he is obsessed by thoughts of the
morrow. Of all the precepts in the Gospels the one that Christians have most neglected is the commandment to take no thought for the morrow. If a man is prudent, thought for the morrow will lead him to save; if he is imprudent, it will make him apprehensive of being unable to pay his debts. In either case the moment loses its savour. Everything is organised, nothing is spontaneous. — Bertrand Russell

It is very iniquitous to make me pay my debts, you have no idea of the pain it gives one. — Lord Byron

[13] But it sometimes comes about that, when we have properly granted certain premisses, certain conclusions are derived from them that, though false, nonetheless follow from them. [14] What am I to do, then? Accept the false conclusion? [15] And how is that possible? Then should I say that I was wrong to accept the premisses? No, this isn't permissible either. Or say: That doesn't follow from the premisses? But that again isn't permissible. [16] So what is one to do in such circumstances? Isn't it the same as with debts? Just as having borrowed on some occasion isn't enough to make somebody a debtor, but it is necessary in addition that he continues to owe the money and hasn't paid off the loan; likewise, our having accepted the premisses isn't enough to make it necessary for us to accept the inference, but we have to continue to accept the premisses. [ — Epictetus

But before you forget, while you sit stagnant in your little corner of the board, there is one piece that obeys almost no rules and has her own commands. Utter freedom is the way of the queen. She is your most powerful piece, your very best ally, the ruination of your enemy - but only if you utilize her properly, my king. Only if you are willing to do what it takes to plumb the debts of her power to aid you to victory. Just try to win without her, and you'll see you are doomed to failure. — Jacquelyn Frank

Thou contentedly let the years slip by and make no effort to repay, then thou hast but the contemptible soul of a slave. No man is otherwise who cannot respect himself and no man can respect himself who does not repay honest debts. — George S. Clason

Poverty is when there is no food and a child is forced to fill its stomach with water for the night. — Matsime Simon Mohapi

It's not the best between my family and me. There are so many crimes left unpunished, debts unpaid, white elephants in the middle of the room that no one will even offer a peanut to. We are in the red, emotionally speaking. — Margaret Cho

Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it's the paying of debts you're forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it's a form of lying - lying to oneself. And I'm very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies - which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved! — Mark Lawrence

One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Well what would happen is that if Greece defaulted and couldn't pay its debts, all the Greek bonds that are held in other banking systems across Western Europe would suddenly have no value. You could as a knock-on effect create a banking crisis in Western Europe. — John Major

My beloved boat is broken on the rocks of daily life. I've paid my debts and no longer need to count pains I've suffered at the hands of others. The misfortunes and the insults. Good luck to those who remain. — Jennifer Niven

In Heaven, there are no debts - all have been paid, one way or another - but in Hell there's nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can't ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly. — Margaret Atwood

No government proposal more complicated than "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private" ever works. — P. J. O'Rourke

Like all other self-respecting peoples, we have no intention of paying our debts. Or, to be more nearly accurate, the capitalists who expect to exploit us " for all time and eternity " have no intention of permitting us to pay our debts. They trump up new schemes to cause us to go more deeply into their debt. They intoxicate us with the strong fumes of "world power." They tell us how fine a thing it is to be reckoned among the great nations of the world. They cause us to maintain great military establishments and to build more and greater dreadnoughts. Thirty years ago we spent almost nothing on the navy and little more on the army. Now we are spending $300,000,000 a year on the army and navy. Almost a million dollars every week-day. Sixty-five cents of every dollar that is raised by the American government by taxation is spent for wars past or to come - for pensions, battleships or soldiers. — Anonymous

There is no more reprehensible god playing than the use of children for sexual gratification, the exploitation of widows and their children by distant relatives after the death of a father, the misuse of police powers to extort false confessions and protect the perpetrators of sexual violence, or the serial enslavement of generation after generation to extract payments on unpayable debts. All of these and more are abuses of power that IJM targets in countries around the world where the public justice system does not work on behalf of the poor and powerless. — Andy Crouch

But the trouble with living in the moment is that the moment passes. Impulse and spontaneity take no account of the longer term, of responsibilities and obligations, debts to be paid, promises to fulfil. I — David Nicholls

The English-language press in India supports the project of corporate globalization fully. It has no time for dispossession and drought and farmers' debts, the ravages that the corporate globalization project is wreaking on the poor of India. So to suddenly turn around and condemn the riots is a typical middle-class response. Let's support everything that leads to the conditions in which the massacre takes place, but when the killing starts, you recoil in middle-class horror, and say, Oh, that's not very nice. Can't we be more civilized? — Arundhati Roy

Today the logic goes something like this: 'Calling a ruler Son of God is out of style. No one really does that nowadays. We can support a president while also worshiping Jesus as the Son of God.' But how is this possible? For one says that we must love our enemies, and the other says we must kill them; one promotes the economics of competition, while the other admonishes the forgiveness of debts. To which do we pledge allegiance? — Shane Claiborne

When you happen on someone who's in trouble or needs help among your people with whom you live in this land that GOD, your God, is giving you, don't look the other way pretending you don't see him. Don't keep a tight grip on your purse. No. Look at him, open your purse, lend whatever and as much as he needs. Don't count the cost. Don't listen to that selfish voice saying, "It's almost the seventh year, the year of All-Debts-Are-Canceled," and turn aside and leave your needy neighbor in the lurch, refusing to help him. He'll call GOD's attention to you and your blatant sin. — Eugene H. Peterson

Kieran's hands came up to cup Mark's face. His touch was gentle. "I am not doing it for you," he said. "This will be what I do for Emma and the others. Then that debt will be paid. You and I, our debts are paid already." He leaned forward and brushed his lips against Mark's. Mark wanted to chase the kiss, the warmth of it, the familiarity. He felt Kieran's hand come down to splay itself over his chest-over the elf-bolt that hung there, below his collarbone. "We will be done with each other".

"No," Mark whispered. — Cassandra Clare

[Richard Bedford Bennett] was the richest Prime Minister and the only millionaire to hold office before Pierre Trudeau. His money obviously colored his thinking
colored it true blue
but he did not consider it a political drawback. No leader, he said, could serve the public properly if he was constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of debts. This theory is now widely accepted in the United States where it has become practically impossible for a non-millionaire to run for high office without selling pieces of himself like a prize-fighter. Yet the public still suspects a self-made millionaire like Lyndon Johnson while revering the much-richer John F. Kennedy, who got it all from his father. — Gordon Donaldson

We have close to us as much as Joseph had at Nazareth; we have our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, but our poor eyes fail to see Him. Let us once become interior souls and we shall immediately see. In no better way can we enter into the Heart of our Lord than through Saint Joseph. Jesus and Mary are eager to pay the debts which they owe him for his devoted care of them, and their greatest pleasure is to fulfill his least desire. Let him, then, lead you by hand into the interior sanctuary of Jesus Eucharistic. — Peter Julian Eymard

Melanie cried, but only a little bit. She had gained quite a bit of experience with crying over the past few years. She could at least console herself that she never cried at trivial things; no book had ever brought her to tears. Instead, it was deaths, debts, and abandonment that moved her to tears. The world had simply decided that it didn't particularly like Melanie Masters, and that was an appropriate thing to cry about.

In the end, Melanie did what she always did after crying. She got to her feet, said a silent curse, and went back to work. The world didn't like her, but she didn't like the world either. It would be impossible to burn the whole world down, so the only other option was to carry on as though she weren't losing a small piece of her soul with every attack the world made against her. — Alexander Wales

And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.'
To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means being happy that things should be so. — Simone Weil

There is a portent of stormy weather ahead to which we had better give heed ... No one knows when emergencies will strike ... Set your houses in order. If you have paid your debts, if you have a reserve, even though it be small, then should storms howl about your head, you will have shelter for your wife and children and peace in your hearts. That's all I have to say about it, but I wish to say it with all the emphasis of which I am capable. — Gordon B. Hinckley

A full night's sleep without money worries was a luxury. They were afraid to answer the door to strangers as they often could not pay the rent and had no TV license. They lived in fear of been brought to court for bad debts. They became master liars and a sarcastic tongue and cheeky nature were vital survival skills people learned in Wasteside. They pretended to officials at front doors they were child minders and they refused to accept or sign anything official or registered in case it was a summons — Annette J. Dunlea

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you're going to die. There is always the possibility of escape. There is always somewhere else and far away, a fact I had never really appreciated until I read Gitta Sereny's profoundly unsettling Cries Unheard about child-killer Mary Bell.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with.
This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks. — Mark Haddon

Many a poor soul has had to suffer from the weight of the debts on him, finding no rest or peace after death. — Lady Gregory

And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers. — Thomas Jefferson

No generation has a right to contract debts greater than can be paid off during the course of its own existence. — Thomas Jefferson