“Fell lust of gold! abhorred, accurst!
What will not men to slake such thirst?”

“To what extremes won't you compel our hearts,
you accursed lust for gold?”
Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra fames?

“God has given the salt lick to the deer; and He has given to man, red-skin and white, the delicious spring at which to slake his thirst.”

“And yet
to wine, to opium even, I prefer
the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;
and in the wasteland of desire
your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.”

“The entire world is worthless excepting five things: to eat for survival, to take water in order to slake thirst, clothes to cover body, house to dwell in, knowledge just to act upon.”

“Then twangling their bibles with wrath in their nostrils
From Bonehill Fields came Bunyan and Blake:
"Laredo the golden is fallen, is fallen;
Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake."”

“And in a flash I understood the meaning of sex. It is a craving for the mingling of consciousness, whose symbol is the mingling of bodies. Every time a man and a woman slake their thirst in the strange waters of the other's identity, they glimpse the immensity of their freedom.”

“Dire lust of gold! how mighty thy controll
To bend to crime man's impotence of soul!”

“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.”

“Everything is valuable under the right conditions. To a man dying of thirst, water be more precious than gold. To a drowning man, water be of little worth and great trouble.”