Quotes & Sayings About Scarce

A husband is indeed thought by both sexes so very valuable, that scarce a man who can keep himself clean and make a bow, but thinks he is good enough to pretend to any woman ... — Mary Astell

Scarce any problem will appear more hard and difficult, than that of determining the distance of the Sun from the Earth very near the truth: but even this ... will without much labour be effected. — Edmond Halley

The survivorship of a worthy man in his son is a pleasure scarce inferior to the hopes of the continuance of his own life. — Richard Steele

This wretched Inn, where we scarce stay to bait,
We call our Dwelling-Place:
We call one Step a Race:
But angels in their full enlightened state,
Angels, who Live, and know what 'tis to Be,
Who all the nonsense of our language see
Who speak things, and our words, their ill-drawn pictures, scorn,
When we, by a foolish figure, say,
Behold an old man dead! then they
Speak properly, and cry, Behold a man-child born! — Abraham Cowley

Come with me, come with me
I'll revisit the solitary mosque near hill brook,
Where men are scarce, come let's see,
I'll hold your hands as I took
The hands of my shiver strains,
Of poignant losses, of miniscule gains,
Come with me across these marsh mellows
Dividing our men into doves and scarecrows!
Come sit with the longing in these abandoned rows
where the frozen eyes burn renunciation stoves,
Let's visit the solitary mosque near hill brook; — Ashfaq Saraf

Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believed, Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived. — George Herbert

Even good excuses, really good ones, don't help very much.
Explanations, on the other hand, are both scarce and useful.
And accurate forecasts and insightful intuition are priceless. — Seth Godin

The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion. — Lord Chesterfield

All that weeping makes me want to slap her," he complained, "and I can scarce sleep for her sobbing." You would weep as well if you had a son and lost him, Sam almost said. He could not blame Gilly for her grief. Instead, he blamed Jon Snow and wondered when Jon's heart had turned to stone. Once he asked Maester Aemon that very question, when Gilly was down at the canal fetching water for them. "When you raised him up to be the lord commander," the old man answered. — George R R Martin

Yule is supposed to be a celebration and a consolation, a moment of warm brightness in the heart of winter, a time to eat because you know that the lean times are coming when food will be scarce and ice locks the land, and a time to be happy and get drunk and behave irresponsibly and wake up the next morning wondering if you will ever feel well again, but the West Saxons handed the feast to the priests who made it as joyous as a funeral. — Bernard Cornwell

Sometimes we hold on to our possessions because we fear we might run out - life seems scarce. But when we believe that giving is the way to live, we will produce more in the future - life seems abundant. — John C. Maxwell

It is particularly odd that economists who profess to be champions of a free-market economy, should go to such twists and turns to avoid facing the plain fact: that gold, that scarce and valuable market-produced metal, has always been, and will continue to be, by far the best money for human society. — Murray Rothbard

Most long lives resemble those threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathways of some worm from his cradle to his grave. — James Russell Lowell

In rural and struggling Lexington, Virginia, Lee's new postwar home, one writer joked darkly dollars were so scarce that they had to be introduced to one another when they met on Main Street. — Charles Bracelen Flood

Growing up the way I grew up, food was scarce. So when you had an opportunity to eat, you ate. When I graduated from high school and went to college, I weighed 160 pounds. So, I knew I had to put on the weight. I ate everything from fried food to fried chicken wings. When I came to Green Bay, I did the same thing because I was 172 pounds. — Donald Driver

You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man
or scarce a man yet
the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Alas! the small discredit of a bribe Scarce hurts the lawyer, but undoes the scribe. — Alexander Pope

Good intentions are ubiquitous in politics; what is scarce is accurate beliefs. — Bryan Caplan

We have had scarce investment in women ... One of my tasks is that everyone spends much more on women. — Michelle Bachelet

Scarce any man becomes eminently disagreeable but by a departure from his real character, and an attempt at something for which nature or education has left him unqualified. — Samuel Johnson

It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every second of the day.
Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more of a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done. — Walter Mosley

When a resource is scarce, you increase its yield. — Peter Drucker

In some conditions, the architecture of textile is more relevant than in other conditions or the opacity of the material form. Pattern in the world of scarce materiality and a hybridity becomes a way of creating a new authenticity. Sometimes there is a certain kind of nobility of a group of materials literally of the earth, which had a certain nobility of presence, but is very different from the materials we have now. — David Adjaye

Them as is not wanted scarce ever thrives. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that. — Benjamin Franklin

When gasoline and rubber are rationed, electric power and transport facilities are becoming increasingly scarce, and manpower shortages are developing, it is difficult for people to understand their increased use for other than the most vital needs of war. — William Lyon Mackenzie King

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age. — Ivan Illich

Life's a forge! Yes, and hammer and anvil, too! You'll be roasted, smelted, and pounded, and you'll scarce know what's happening to you. But stand boldly to it! Metal's worthless till it's shaped and tempered! More labor than luck. Face the pounding, don't fear the proving; and you'll stand well against any hammer and anvil. — Lloyd Alexander

They all memorized a simple phrase, "Be helpful, be useful, be scarce. — Damian Wampler

But where the greater malady is fix'd The lesser is scarce felt. — William Shakespeare

When time is scarce, use what you have. When time is plenty, remember, it will soon be scarce. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be ... The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. — Adam Smith

What is in great demand, but scarce, is expensive, but even when wisdom is not in demand it is priceless. — Matshona Dhliwayo

While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps,
Between us two let there be peace, both joining,
As joined in injuries, and enmity
Against a foe by doom express assigned us,
That cruel serpent. — John Milton

I should think that people would be more interested in politics and all that is happening, rather than two lovebirds who are looking to wed. I think it's very nice that in an age when love is so scarce that people are willing to gamble on getting married. — Yoko Ono

Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. Nor does past experience give reason to expect natural resources to become more scarce. Rather, if history is any guide, natural resources will progressively become less costly, hence less scarce, and will constitute a smaller proportion of our expenses in future years. — Julian Simon

Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed. — Amy Hempel

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you - here I opened wide the door;
Darkness there, and nothing more. — Edgar Allan Poe

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,
Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,
I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then
Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men
Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.
Hark! There's the big bombardment on our right
Rumbling and bumping; and the dark's a glare
Of flickering horror in the sectors where
We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,
Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.
"What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?"
Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:
Why did he do it? ... Starlight overhead
Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead. — Siegfried Sassoon

It is in fact necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. There is no reason why we shouldn't spend our vacations on (the North Sea island of) Sylt instead of in the Seychelles, or drive more economical cars - for the sake of preserving increasingly scarce resources if nothing else. But that won't enable us to stop climate change. As long as China, India and the United States continue the way they have been, what we Germans do is more or less irrelevant. — Hans Von Storch

William the Testy. On the contrary, he conceived that the true wisdom of legislation consisted in the multiplicity of laws. He accordingly had great punishments for great crimes, and little punishments for little offences. By degrees the whole surface of society was cut up by ditches and fences, and quickset hedges of the law, and even the sequestered paths of private life so beset by petty rules and ordinances, too numerous to be remembered, that one could scarce walk at large without the risk of letting off a spring-gun or falling into a man-trap. In a little while the blessings of innumerable laws became apparent; a class of men arose to expound and confound them. Petty courts were instituted to take cognizance of petty offences, pettifoggers began to abound, and the community was soon set together by the ears. — Washington Irving

No boyfriend! Why not?
Eligible men are scarce - most of them are buried in France.
What about them Americans?
Oh, no. I can't. — David Dennington

Literature is the voice of the age and the state; the character, energy, and resources of the country are reflected and imaged forth in the conceptions of its great minds; they are organs of the time; they speak not their own language, they scarce think their own thoughts; but under an impulse like the prophetic enthusiasm of old, they must feel and utter the sentiments which society inspires. — Edward Everett

Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy; and he that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night; while laziness travels so slowly, that poverty soon overtakes him. — Benjamin Franklin

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them,
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun. — William Shakespeare

Perhaps [God] resided only above England. Or perhaps He had retired and now lived quietly in some remote Condominium Galaxy where He enjoyed a game of intergalactic golf now and again, deftly driving, pitching and putting stars into eighteen black holes in space, loosing devils on us whenever He scored a bogey. Or perhaps He hid behind every tree, rock and bush, or was closer than my very breath. Whatever He did, however He did it, Whoever and Whatever He wasn't or was, if he wanted my attention He'd have to leave off making Himself so scarce. — David James Duncan

Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that for all our talk of an information economy, what we really have is an attentional economy, if the term "economy" applies to what is scarce and therefore valuable. — Matthew B. Crawford

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being. — Jerry Saltz

Let those find fault whose wit's so very small, They've need to show that they can think at all; Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below. Fops may have leave to level all they can; As pigmies would be glad to lop a man. Half-wits are fleas; so little and so light, We scarce could know they live, but that they bite. — John Dryden

He is not drowning His sheep when He washeth them, nor killing them when He is shearing them. But by this He showeth that they are His own: and the new-shorn sheep do most visibly bear His name or mark; when it is almost worn out and scarce discernible on them that have the longest fleece. — Richard Baxter

If you go out looking for friends, they'll be scarce. If you go out looking to be one, you'll have all the friends you need. — Zig Ziglar

If you go out looking for friends, you're going to find they are very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you'll find them everywhere. — Zig Ziglar

The camels had strayed far in search of scarce grass. When collected, they displayed a fiendish ingenuity in throwing their loads and tangling themselves up in every possible strap. — Rosita Forbes

When I started Biocon in 1978, the obstacles I needed to navigate were manifold - ranging from infrastructural hurdles to issues related to my credibility as a business woman. With no access to venture capital, money was scarce and high-cost, debt-based capital was all I had. — Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation - EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce - and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter - all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist. Or so I heard. No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn's cat. I decided to kill myself. — Dan Simmons

The raven red, on ruby pinions winging its way between the worlds, hears dead men singing. It scarce knows it strength, the price it scarce knows, but its power will arise and the Circle will close. — Kerstin Gier

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand. — Josh Billings

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,
when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,
oh, then diet yourself well on biography,
the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Set the basketball on the kitchen table. Open a cupboard, get out a bottle of sesame seeds, and place a single seed beside the basketball. If you were to reduce the Earth to the size of a basketball, all the fresh surface water on the planet - all those rivers and lakes and ponds and streams - would fit inside that one tiny sesame seed. Add a second sesame seed; now you have all the usable underground water as well. Is fresh water a scarce resource? — William Ashworth

Meanwhile, time is one of our most scarce resources. At the moment, you are reading instead of working, playing with the dog, applying to law school, shopping for groceries, or having sex. Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics. — Charles Wheelan

Life management begins with mind management. The quality of your life is influenced by the quality of your thoughts. Your thoughts do form your world. Scarce thoughts create a life of scarcity. Thoughts of abundance lead to abundant circumstances. — Robin Sharma

In an economy of grace, there is enough to go around. The Father's love and generosity are not scarce. His table is brimming with luxurious fare. That is why we invite those who cannot repay us. After all, it is not our table, but his. — Michael S. Horton

I have never seen the sea quiet round Treasure Island. The sun might blaze overhead, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still these great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night; and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Our forefathers looked upon nature with more reverence and horror, before the world was enlightened by learning and philosophy, and loved to astonish themselves with the apprehensions of witchcraft, prodigies, charms, and inchantments. There was not a village in England that had not a ghost in it, the church-yards were all haunted, every large common had a circle of fairies belonging to it, and there was scarce a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit. — Joseph Addison

About these developments George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four , was quite wrong. He described a new kind of state and police tyranny, under which the freedom of speech has become a deadly danger, science and its applications have regressed, horses are again plowing untilled fields, food and even sex have become scarce and forbidden commodities: a new kind of totalitarian puritanism, in short. But the very opposite has been happening. The fields are plowed not by horses but by monstrous machines, and made artificially fertile through sometimes poisonous chemicals; supermarkets are awash with luxuries, oranges, chocolates; travel is hardly restricted while mass tourism desecrates and destroys more and more of the world; free speech is not at all endangered but means less and less. — John Lukacs

Land ownership is an entry monopoly: Land is naturally scarce for each location since its supply can't be increased... When people buy a piece of land, their ownership gives them the right to exclude the rest of society from the benefits afforded to them by their land, even though those benefits only arise from nature and from the presence of goods and services that have been provided by that same society in the first place. Buyers pay for exclusive access rights to land and pay only to the previous landowner instead of to all the people who are now excluded from the location privileges that this one particular piece of land provides. — Martin Adams

I accept the fact that there is always a way out in every situation we find ourselves but, until we begin to ponder, panacea will be very scarce — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

When we really get into hard times, where food is scarce or there is none at all, and so with clothing and shelter, money may be no good for there may be nothing to buy, and you cannot eat money, you cannot get enough of it together to burn to keep you warm, and you cannot wear it. — J. Reuben Clark

People are vaccinated with dangerous chemicals during their childhood, indoctrinated with immorality through television while growing up, taught to reject God by their teachers, fed with genetically modified food, and led to suspect others by their relatives and friends, and then you wonder why it's so difficult to find a normal person in this modern world, why nobody assumes responsibility for their words and behavior, and why everyone is so selfishly abusive. The biblical apocalypse has begun and the zombies are everywhere. It's just that we call them stupid and selfish instead. But they do act like there's no life inside of them anymore. There are no more normal human beings around. The survivors of this apocalypse are extremely scarce and must be treasured. — Robin Sacredfire

The financial doctrines so zealously followed by American companies might help optimize capital when it is scarce. But capital is abundant. If we are to see our economy really grow, we need to encourage migratory capital to become productive capital - capital invested for the long-term in empowering innovations. — Clayton M Christensen

I do not ask for a path with no trouble or regret.
I ask instead for a friend who'll walk with me down any path.
I do not ask never to feel pain.
I ask instead for courage, even when hope can scarce shine through.
And one more thing I ask:
That in every hour of joy or pain, I feel the Creator close by my side.
This is my truest prayer for myself and for all I love, now and forever, Amen. — Kersten Hamilton

O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been Alone on a wide wide sea: So lonely 'twas, that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Its very memory gives a shape to fear. Death could scarce be more bitter than that place! — Dante Alighieri

The greatness of the object enabled my mind to support what my strengths of body was scarce equal to. — Barbara W. Tuchman

To describe my scarce leisure time in today's terms, I always default to reading. — Jimmy Buffett

He that dare not die, dare scarce fight valiantly (475). — Richard Baxter

They say, the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony;
Where words are scarce, they're seldom spent in vain;
For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain. — William Shakespeare

There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. — Robert Half

We allow it to be dumped into this community asset, which is our one and only atmosphere. So that has to change, and there's really only one entity that can do that. So we have proposed a cap-and-trade system to stop that unlimited pollution, to use the forces of the market to efficiently allocate scarce permits to allow CO2 into the atmosphere. That's just one of 500 things we need to do, but it's probably the granddaddy of them all. — Jay Inslee

Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules. — Neal Stephenson

I must talk to Kennit first. He will tell me when he is ready for us to have a baby."
"Never," Bolt said flatly.
"What?"
"Never wait for a male on any such decision. You are the queen. You decide. Males are not made for such decisions. I have seen it time and time again. They would have you wait for days of sunshine and wealth and plenty. Yet to a male, enough is never sufficient, and plenty never reached. A queen knows that when times are hardest and game most scarce, that is when one must care most about the continuance of the race. Some things are not for males to decide. — Robin Hobb

When I think about creating abundance, it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility. It is about taking that which was scarce and making it abundant. — Peter Diamandis

The expenditure of paper and printer ink had been somewhat lavish. Two generations from now, if any humans survived, they would look on this heap of documents with some combination of disgust and amazement. Because paper was going to be scarce by then, and they would view its use for such purposes in roughly the same way as Americans of the twenty-first century had viewed the use of sperm whale oil to fuel streetlamps. — Neal Stephenson

This I said in the Irish way, about which there is allowed to be something very engaging. It's a remarkable thing, and a testimony to the love with which our nation is regarded, that this address scarce ever fails in a handsome fellow. I cannot tell how often I have seen a private soldier escape the horse, or a beggar wheedle out a good alms, by a touch of the brogue. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth. — George Reisman

when I enter the Netherworld will rest be scarce? I shall lie there sleeping all down the years! 'Let my eyes see the sun and be sated with light! The darkness is hidden, how much light is there left? Sii 15' When may the dead see the rays of the sun? — Anonymous

Using the latest in science and technology to shatter today's economic paradigm of 'insatiable individuals competing for scarce resources,' Planetary Citizenship brings us full circle to the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples and the sacredness of creation. — Rebecca Adamson

Our age is so resolutely unheroic, and the employment opportunities for registered demigods are now so scarce, that all we can do, in our enfeebled state, is laugh with envy and disbelief at the memory of those who still had the wit and the wherewithal to live large. — Anthony Lane

Thinkers are as scarce as gold. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

savoring the words, and then aloud to me: "'Reckon not upon long life: think every day the last, and live always beyond thy account. He that so often surviveth his Expectation lives many Lives, and will scarce complain of the shortness of his days. Time past is gone like a Shadow; make time to come present - '" " - So — Bill Hayes

We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if webelieved in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The bottom line is that we have entered an age when local communities need to invest in themselves. Federal and state dollars are becoming more and more scarce for American cities. Political and civic leaders in local communities need to make a compelling case for this investment. — Mick Cornett

Many species of wit are quite mechanical; these are the favorites of witlings, whose fame in words scarce outlives the remembrance of their funeral ceremonies. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

To trace in Nature's most minute design The signature and stamp of power divine ... The Invisible in things scarce seen revealed, To whom an atom is an ample field. — William Cowper

I board with a poor Scotchman: his wife can talk scarce any English. — David Brainerd

Skill teachers are made scarce by the belief in the value of
licenses. Certification constitutes a form of market manipulation and is plausible only to a schooled mind.
Most teachers of arts and trades are less skillful, less inventive, and less communicative than the best craftsmen
and tradesmen. Most high-school teachers of Spanish or French do not speak the language as correctly as their
pupils might after half a year of competent drills. Experimentsconducted by Angel Quintero in Puerto Rico
suggest that many young teen-agers, if given the proper incentives, programs, and access to tools, are better than
most schoolteachers at introducing their peers to the scientific exploration of plants, stars, and matter, and to the
discovery of how and why a motor or a radio functions. — Ivan Illich

My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored
Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby. — Robert Browning

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate. — Francis Bacon

Men say they are of the same religion, for quietness' sake; but if the matter were well examined, you would scarce find three anywhere of the same religion on all points. — John Selden

More time on the problem isn't the way. More guts is. When you expose yourself to the opportunities that scare you, you create something scarce, something others won't do. — Seth