The point of this saying is not that poverty is a virtue, but that happiness does not come with wealth, but from setting limits to one’s desires, and living within those limits with satisfaction.
In [Rubin, Gary, Your Emotional Fitness: Everything You Need to Know to Live a Life of Abundance, http://books.google.com/books?id=CGqu8-5W7UUC&pg=PA173, April 2013, Balboa Press, 978-1-4525-7059-4, 173–].
“In my opinion, every rich man is a miser.”
Book I, Ch. 14
Essais (1595), Book I
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Michel De Montaigne 264
(1533-1592) French-Occitan author, humanistic philosopher, … 1533–1592Related quotes
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Attention and Will (1947), p. 216
“A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.”
Letter to N.A. Leikin (May 8, 1895)
Letters
“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
Deming Headlight (New Mexico), 6 January 1950, as cited in the Yale Book of Modern Proverbs and at There Are Opinions, And Then There Are Facts; Freakonomics blog post by Fred R. Shapiro http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/18/there-are-opinions-and-then-there-are-facts/ (18 August 2011)
“Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.”
No. 305
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)
“Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments”
No. 163 (8 October 1751)
The Rambler (1750–1752)
Context: Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.
“What is man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”
Antimémoires, preface (1967)
This preface paraphrases a line of dialogue from his own earlier work: "A man is what he hides: a miserable little pile of secrets."
Original: (fr) L'homme est ce qu'il cache : un misérable petit tas de secrets.
“Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.”
Source: Pensées and Other Writings