“Altars are trimmed, and the poor suffer the bitter pangs of hunger.”
Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202) Italian abbot
in Man on His Own (1970), p. 120
“Bitter poverty has no harder pang than that it makes men ridiculous.”
Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se,
quam quod ridiculos homines facit.
III, line 152-3.
Variant translations:
Of all the Griefs that harrass the Distrest,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful Jest.
As translated by Samuel Johnson
The hardest thing to bear in poverty is the fact that it makes men ridiculous.
Wretched poverty offers nothing harsher than this: it makes men ridiculous.
Satires, Satire III
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Source: You Learn by Living (1960), p. 152
Context: "Anxiety," Kierkegaard said, "is the dizziness of freedom." This freedom of which men speak, for which they fight, seems to some people a perilous thing. It has to be earned at a bitter cost and then — it has to be lived with. For freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
We must all face and unpalatable fact that we have, too often, a tendency to skim over; we proceed on the assumption that all men want freedom. This is not as true as we would like it to be. Many men and women who are far happier when they have relinquish their freedom, when someone else guides them, makes their decisions for them, takes the responsibility for them and their actions. They don't want to make up their minds. They don't want to stand on their own feet.
“Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.”
Willa Cather book The Song of the Lark
Part II, Ch. 3
The Song of the Lark (1915)
“Clothes make the poor invisible…. America has the best-dressed poverty the world has ever known.”
Michael Harrington book The Other America
Source: The Other America (1962), Ch. 1, sct. 1