Quotes & Sayings About Thrift

I grew to judge every purchase by how many bronze screws I could buy for the boat if I didn't spend on this or made do without that. — Lin Pardey

Fundamentally, the basis of all modern progress is the efficiency of labor. And the only sure road to restored prosperity is through the thrift and hard work of our people as a whole. — Charles M. Schwab

My first impulse, when presented with any spanking-new piece of computer hardware, is to imagine how it will look in ten years' time, gathering dust under a card table in a thrift shop. — William Gibson

Thrift is not an affair of the pocket, but an affair of character.-S.W. Straus — Charmaine Gerber

Anormal day looks like, you know, shower, put on the same jeans, the same tattered Gucci loafers I got at the thrift store, white socks, and my t-shirt and my very beat-up Helmut Lang blazer. I'm in the exact same outfit every day. — Natasha Lyonne

Thrift of time will repay you in after-life with a thousandfold of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams. — William E. Gladstone

When I'd first brought it home from the thrift store, I'd planned to keep it in the closet I shared with Summer, But Jordis asked me to hang it in full view of the room because she liked the glitter. — Jennifer Echols

If dislocation is a permanent state, I want to try and explore the possibility of temporary impermanence. If dislocation is a tatty dress from the thrift store, perhaps the solution is not to cast it aside. If dislocation is a tatty dress, perhaps the only solution is to mend it, scent it, and wear it until everything about it signifies newness, something close to the perpetual promise of a fresh start. — Diriye Osman

Fashion is such a weird thing. Growing up, I just made do with whatever I had access to - a lot of hand-me-downs and thrift store shopping. — Ruby Rose

I like to find the beauty in the ugly. When I'm in a thrift store, I gravitate toward pieces I know I'll wear a ton, and insane pieces that I'm sure most people would consider gross. But I find them inspiring. Our van is currently stocked with some of my random findings from this tour. Maybe I'll call my aesthetic 'van fashion.' — Victoria Legrand

The plodding thrift and scrupulous integrity and long-winded patient industry of our business men of the last century are out of fashion in these "giddy-paced" times, and England is forgetting that those who make haste to be rich can hardly avoid much temptation and some sin. — Fanny Kemble

Waste is worse than loss. The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly. The scope of thrift is limitless. — Thomas A. Edison

This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we're upper class. And when the dust clears - when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity - there's nothing left over. Nothing for the kids' college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn't spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway. — J.D. Vance

Waste begets self-will; thrift begets meanness: but better be mean than self-willed. — Confucius

Thrift is a great revenue. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness. — Paul Goodman

You know how they say Black Flag got in a van, and they brought punk rock to the world? The Strokes got on a bus, and they brought "downtown cool" to the world. Along with the Internet, they were changing everything, not just music. They were changing attitudes. The Strokes were making New York travel with them. I saw kids in Connecticut and Maine and Philadelphia and DC looking like they had just been drinking on Avenue A all night. Sixteen-year-old kids in white belts and Converse Chuck Taylors with the greasy hair - hair that had been clean a week ago. Those kids had probably never even smelled the inside of a thrift store before Is This It came out. They found a band that they wanted to be like. They found their band. APRIL — Lizzy Goodman

The reward of energy, enterprise and thrift is taxes. — William Feather

Financial uncertainty turns some people into misers and others into spendthrifts. — Rebecca Loncraine

My mom passed on her obsession of all things antique or vintage. I love to go thrift store shopping or explore any sort of garage sale. Treasure hunting is a family passion. — Zoey Deutch

I've been told I have an Irish temper, I know I have Scottish thrift, and, like the English, I love a good show. — Jeanette MacDonald

Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges. — Louis B. Wright

By habits of thrift and economy, by way of the industrial school and college, we are coming up. We are crawling up, working up, yea, bursting up-often through oppression, unjust discrimination and prejudice-but through them all we are coming up, and with proper habits, intelligence, and property, there is no power on earth than can permanently stay our progress. — Booker T. Washington

Today, a similar debate rages in black communities about the underlying causes of mass incarceration. While some argue that it is attributable primarily to racial bias and discrimination, others maintain that it is due to poor education, unraveling morals, and a lack of thrift and perseverance among the urban poor. Just as former slaves were viewed (even among some African Americans) as unworthy of full citizenship due to their lack of education and good morals, today similar arguments can be heard from black people across the political spectrum who believe that reform efforts should be focused on moral uplift and education for ghetto dwellers, rather than challenging the system of mass incarceration itself. — Michelle Alexander

That law of nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits; it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power. The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation and not in augmenting animal existence. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pirate gold isn't a thing to be hoarded or utilized. It is something to squander and throw to the four winds, for the fun of seeing the golden specks fly. — Kate Chopin

I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books. — Michael Dirda

Honey, you can't call dibs on a human being." Her tone rose high enough to shatter glass. "Like calling something mine makes it so, because if it did, I'd be driving around town in a Porsche instead of Granddaddy's broken down Ford. Ain't nothing here that was yours." Using the tray, she backed him against the office door. "Anything you left behind is at the DAV thrift store. They put a price tag on things, and let me tell you, yours wasn't worth much. — Cindy Skaggs

As a kid, I loved going to lots of thrift stores with my parents. There was a period where I thought it was embarrassing, and then I started to get older - I realized they were really cool. — Tessa Thompson

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness
however temporary, however flimsy
of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another. — Alice Munro

Meanness inherits a set of silverware and keeps it in the bank. Economy uses it only on important occasions, for fear of loss. Thrift sets the table with it every night for pure pleasure, but counts the butter spreaders before they are put away. — Phyllis McGinley

I shop only at thrift stores and vintage stores. In New York, I like a place called Star Struck, and a place called The Family Jewels. — Ezra Miller

Over the years, I've made good money in real estate, and for some reason, this hurts Stephen's feelings. He's not a churchman, but he's extremely big on piety and sacrifice and letting you know what fine values he's got. As far as I can tell, these values consist of little more than eating ramen noodles by the case, getting laid once every fifteen years or so, and arching his back at the sight of people like me
that is, people who have amounted to something and don't smell heavily of thrift stores. — Wells Tower

Conservatism
hard work
saving one's money
looking neat and gentlemanly. It was such an Eveless paradise, that. — Theodore Dreiser

Ah, wasteful woman, she who may
On her sweet self set her own price,
Knowing man cannot choose but pay,
How has she cheapened paradise;
How given for nought her priceless gift,
How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine,
Which, spent with due respective thrift,
Had made brutes men and men divine. — Coventry Patmore

Let wealth come in by comely thrift,
And not by any sordid shift;
'T is haste
Makes waste;
Extremes have still their fault.
Who gripes too hard the dry and slipp'ry sand,
Holds none at all, or little, in his hand. — Robert Herrick

Our party, he declared, stands for "the right of property" and "the right of liberty," for institutions that have "stood the test of time," and for an economic system that rewards "energy, courage, enterprise, attention to duty, hard work, thrift, and providence" rather than "laziness, lack of attention, lack of industry, the yielding to appetite and passion. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased
To be paradise, it is this to be destitute. — Wallace Stevens

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

Everywhere you go on the continent of Europe at this hour you see the conflict between militarism and industrialism. You see the expansion of industrial power pushed forward by the energy, hope, and thrift of men, and you see the development arrested, diverted, crippled, and defeated by measures which are dictated by military considerations. — William Graham Sumner

We have come to world leadership because our people have had the opportunity to develop this nation under a government and a Constitution that gave them political freedom and encouraged initiative, enterprise, responsibility, industry and thrift. Freedom and achievement are not unrelated. This nation has become one of history's finest illustrations of how a people can enrich life and raise their whole level of economic well-being when they are given justice, liberty and incentive. — Herbert V. Prochnow

The Bible warns us against greed and selfishness, it does encourage frugality and thrift. — Billy Graham

People who never had enough thrift and forethought to buy and pay for property in the first place seldom have enough to keep property up after they have gained it in some other way. — Thomas Nixon Carver

When I was very little, I probably wanted to be more normal. I probably wanted the Laura Ashley bedroom, and instead I got thrift-store everything. — Miranda July

You have not known what you are
you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life;
Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time;
What you have done returns already in mockeries;
Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?
The mockeries are not you;
Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; — Walt Whitman

The relationship between ethics and thrift can be summed up in one sentence. It is wrong to save money at the expense of others. Period. — Amy Dacyczyn

Cannot people realize how large an income is thrift? — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition. — Wendell Berry

The idea that the profits of capital are really the rewards of a just society for the foresight and thrift of those who sacrificed the immediate pleasures of spending in order that society might have productive capital, had a certain validity in the early days of capitalism, when productive enterprise was frequently initiated through capital saved out of modest incomes. — Reinhold Niebuhr

The opposite of consumption is not thrift - it is generosity. — Raj Patel

I will remark, here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed inventor of the machine, is a most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and - But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated by some converse characteristic. — Mark Twain

I had never been a dresser. My shirts were all faded and shrunken, 5 or 6 years old, threadbare. My pants the same. I hated department stores, I hated the clerks, they acted so superior, they seemed to know the secret of life, they had a confidence I didn't possess. My shoes were always broken down and old, I disliked shoe stores too. I never purchased anything until it was completely unusable, and that included automobiles. It wasn't a matter of thrift, I just couldn't bear to be a buyer needing a seller, seller being so handsome and aloof and superior. Besides, it all took time, time when you could just be laying around and drinking. — Charles Bukowski

I spent my teens and early 20s shopping almost exclusively at thrift stores. — Zoe Lister-Jones

Such a simplified lifestyle can be truly wonderful - you'll finally have time for the things you really love, for relaxation, for outdoor activities, for exercise, for reading or finding peace and quiet, for the loved ones in your life, for the things you're most passionate about. This is what it means to thrive - to live a life full of the things you want in them, and not more. To live a better quality of life without having to spend and buy and consume. — Leo Babauta

The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character, are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support. — Calvin Coolidge

I used to go to Saks, I would go to Bergdorf, I would go to Barneys, I would go to thrift stores in SoHo. — ASAP Rocky

Unforgettable experiences are generally worth splurging on; unlike stuff, memories don't wear out (or take up space, get dusty, break, or get stolen). If you really want to go and work at an orangutan orphanage in Borneo, it will be worth the cash. — Rosie Blythe

The simple index fund solution has been adopted as a cornerstone of investment strategy for many of the nation's pension plans operated by our giant corporations and state and local governments. Indexing is also the predominant strategy for the largest of them all, the retirement plan for federal government employees, the Federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP). The plan has been a remarkable success, and now holds some $173 billion of assets for the benefit of our public servants and members of armed services. — David F. Swensen

Believe me when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after life, with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams; and that waste of it will make you dwindle, alike in intellectual and moral stature, beyond your darkest reckoning. — Herbert Gladstone, 1st Viscount Gladstone

Large enterprises make the few rich, but the majority prosper only through the carefulness and detail of thrift. — Theodore T. Munger

The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritualcreation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The teachings of Christianity - from vicarious redemption to the love of enemies, no thought for the morrow need be taken, that no thrift or care or family or society or solidarity is necessary - these are immoral teachings that have done and continue to inflict untold moral and physical harm on our species. And until we outgrow this nonsense, we have no chance of emancipating ourselves. — Christopher Hitchens

The doctrine of thrift for the poor is dumb and cruel, like advising them to try and lift themselves by their bootstraps. — Norman Thomas

thrift shops make you a king for five bucks. — Wendy Lustbader

Let us avoid debt as we would avoid a plague ... Let every head of every household see to it that he has on hand enough food and clothing, and, where possible, fuel also, for at least a year ahead ... Let every head of household aim to own his own home, free from mortgage. Let us again clothe ourselves with these proved and sterling virtues-honesty, truthfulness, chastity, sobriety, temperance, industry, and thrift; let us discard all covetousness and greed. — J. Reuben Clark

Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character. — Calvin Coolidge

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. — Gertrude Jekyll

Should the poor be flattered? No; let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, and crook the pregnant hinges of the knee where thrift may follow fawning. — William Shakespeare

I'm on tour all the time, so I stop at thrift shops. The minute we hit a town, I'll have my assistant Googling thrift stores. I have him go check beforehand; then we go there. — Travie McCoy

I shop at thrift stores a lot. I have a lot of silver pitchers and I put my flowers in those. I collect antiques, so there are a lot of old rocking chairs ... My friends call my home the vortex because nobody wants to leave. — Monica Potter

You make James Bond look like he shops at a thrift store and cuts his own hair. — Melissa McClone

Avarice is more directly opposed to thrift than generosity is. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

I get my clothes from three sources: Target, thrift shops, and friends. It's simple and it's cheap. — Shawn Amos

Rely on the ordinary virtues that intelligent, balanced human beings have relied on for centuries: common sense, thrift, realistic expectations, patience, and perseverance. — John C. Bogle

There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out. — Thomas Carlyle

Josie examined the booklet, candelabra on the cover, a program. Brahms, and then Psalm 16, Psalm 32, Bach. A prayer, the Mourner's Kaddish, in the flamelike Hebrew, followed by an English pronunciation, a translation. At least she would not clap in the wrong part. She remembered that night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Michael so handsome in his iridescent thrift-store suit and green silk tie, she in her Lana Turner black lace and spike heels. How they peered down from their seats in the top balcony at the horseshoe of musicians with their stands and instruments. When the music stopped, Michael caught hold of her hand. Lacing his fingers in hers, he tenderly bit her knuckles. She would have been the only one applauding. — Janet Fitch

Everything in my house was either free or under 40 bucks, and people come to my house and can't believe that I picked up everything on the street or in a thrift shop. — Elle Varner

The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead. — Nell Zink

This isn't a thrift store ... We're not selling them something less expensive, we're selling them something more special. We have to tell them the story of what we're showing them. And then we have to show them how they can be the new heroine in the story. — Erin McKean

Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste. — G.K. Chesterton

I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can't get out. — Maeve Binchy

I shop at thrift stores and consignment shoppes. I wear my clothes as is, and maybe get them dry cleaned whenever possible. — Leon Bridges

Provision is the foundation of hospitality, and thrift the fuel of magnificence. — Philip Sidney

Thrift shopping is really just an extension of me being that same kid and going into a place that's completely unconventional that has really endless possibilities in terms of outfits that you can put together and really just expressing yourself. — Macklemore

The doctor's wife was not particularly keen on the tendency of proverbs to preach, nevertheless something of this ancient lore must have remained in her memory, the proof being that she filled two of the bags they had brought with beans and chick peas, Keep what is of no use at the moment, and later you will find what you need, one of her grandmothers had told her, the water in which you soak them will also serve to cook them, and whatever remains from the cooking will cease to be water, but will have become broth. It is not only in nature that from time to time not everything is lost and something is gained. — Jose Saramago

The obsession with gold, actually and politically, occurs among those who regard economics as a branch of morality. Gold is solid, gold is durable, gold is rare, gold is even (in certain very peculiar circumstances) convertible. To believe in thrift, solidity and soundness is to believe in some way in the properties of gold. — Christopher Hitchens

Now comes what I perhaps inflatedly call my philosophy of knitting. Like many philosophies, it is hard to express in a few words. Its main tenets are enjoyment and satisfaction, accompanied by thrift, inventiveness, an appearance of industry, and, above all, resourcefulness. — Elizabeth Zimmermann

Some of my favorite pieces are from thrift shops. When I find something I really love, I live, work and sleep in it. — Barry McGee

The real Ashton - the quirky bastard with the smart-ass smile and thrift-store style - could get me to do anything. — Santino Hassell

I commend to you the virtues of thrift and industry. In doing so, I do not wish you to be a "tightwad," if you will pardon that expression, or to be a freeloader, or anything of the kind. — Gordon B. Hinckley

The art of getting riches consists very much in thrift. All men are not equally qualified for getting money, but it is in the power of every one alike to practice this virtue. — Benjamin

You cannot create prosperity by law. Sustained thrift, industry, application, intelligence, are the only things that ever do, or ever will, create prosperity. But you can very easily destroy prosperity by law. — Theodore Roosevelt

Ages of prolonged uncertainty, while they are compatible with the highest degree of saintliness in a few, are inimical to the prosaic every-day virtues of respectable citizens. There seems no use in thrift, when tomorrow all your savings may be dissipated; no advantage in honesty, when the man towards whom you practise it is pretty sure to swindle you; no point in steadfast adherence to the cause, when no cause is important or has a chance of stable victory; no argument in favour of truthfulness, when only supple tergiversation makes the preservation of life and fortune possible. The man whose virtue has no source except a purely terrestrial prudence will in such a world, become an adventurer if he has the courage, and, if not, will seek obscurity as a timid time-server. — Bertrand Russell

I like Goodwill and the thrift stores. I don't like going into a store and picking from a bunch of cute stuff that's already been found. One of the best parts is finding it myself. — Kreayshawn

I dressed in my bedroom, tugging on a pair of jeans, T-shirt, and heavy brown sweater that I'd picked up at a thrift store and loved down to holes. — Devon Monk

When you can take something that is a reject at the thrift store sitting on the bottom of a pile of junk and make it work, make it look interesting, that's real style to me. — Erin Wasson

Why they were loaded with bags of beans and peas and anything else they happened to pick up when they were still some distance away from the street where the first blind man and his wife lived, for that is where they are going, is a question that could only occur to someone who has never in his life suffered shortages. — Jose Saramago

The whole thing of clothes is insane. You can spend a dollar on a jacket in a thrift store. And you can spend a thousand dollars on a jacket in a shop. And if you saw those two jackets walking down the street, you probably wouldn't know which was which. — Helen Mirren

Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral bak'd meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. — William Shakespeare

The system is not intended as a substitute for private savings, pension plans, and insurance protection. It is, rather, intended as the foundation upon which these other forms of protection can be soundly built. Thus, the individual's own work, his planning and his thrift will bring him a higher standard of living upon his retirement, or his family a higher standard of living in the event of his death, than would otherwise be the case. Hence the system both encourages thrift and self-reliance, and helps to prevent destitution in our national life. — Dwight D. Eisenhower