“If all you boast of your great art be true;
Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.”

—  Ben Jonson

VI, To Alchemists, lines 1-2
The Works of Ben Jonson, First Folio (1616), Epigrams

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If all you boast of your great art be true; Sure, willing poverty lives most in you." by Ben Jonson?
Ben Jonson photo
Ben Jonson 93
English writer 1572–1637

Related quotes

George Bernard Shaw photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“So don’t boast, don’t be arrogant. You, at that moment, rise out of your self-centeredness to the type of living that makes you an integrated personality.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Conquering Self-centeredness (1957)
Context: We never get anywhere in this world without the forces of history and individual persons in the background helping us to get there. If you have the privilege of a fine education, well, you have it because somebody made it possible. If you have the privilege to gain wealth and a bit of the world’s goods, well, you have it because somebody made it possible. So don’t boast, don’t be arrogant. You, at that moment, rise out of your self-centeredness to the type of living that makes you an integrated personality.

Damien Hirst photo

“Great art – or good art – is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different. There's boring conceptual art and there's boring traditional art. Great art is if you can't stop thinking about it, then it becomes a memory.”

Damien Hirst (1965) artist

Source: Elizabeth Day Damien Hirst: 'Art is childish and childlike' http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2010/sep/26/damien-hirst-art, The Guardian, 26 September 2010

Henry Miller photo
Saddam Hussein photo
Democritus photo

“If your desires are not great, a little will seem much to you; for small appetite makes poverty equivalent to wealth.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Freeman (1948), p. 170
Variant: By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich.

Charles Krauthammer photo
Ernest Dimnet photo

“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.”

Ernest Dimnet (1866–1954) French writer

Source: What we live by (1932), p. 141

Harriet Martineau photo

Related topics