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1 " You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. "
― Woodrow Wilson
2 " ...when we condescend, when we act consistently with a sense of the character of people in general which demeans them, we impoverish them AND ourselves, and preclude our having a part in the creation of the highest wealth, the testimony to the mysterious beauty of life we all value in psalms and tragedies and epics and meditations, in short stories and novels. "
― Marilynne Robinson
3 " For many potential Bible readers, this expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. You're not holy enough to read the Holy Bible. It might even be sacrilege for you to try. If the Bible is God's perfect infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. That is, our sinful nature as fallen creatures is what separates us from God, and therefore from God’s Word. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you " what it really says." I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature. "
4 " Of all the vices which degrade the human character, Selfishness is the most odious and contemptible. An undue love of Self leads to the most mon¬strous crimes and occasions the greatest misfortunes both in States and Families. As a selfish man will impoverish his family and often bring them to ruin, so a selfish king brings ruin on his people and often plunges them into war. "
― William Makepeace Thackeray
5 " The great art of life is to moderate our passions. Objects of affection are like other belongings. We must love them enough to enrich our lives while we have them, not enough to impoverish our lives when they are gone. "
― C.S. Lewis , The Pilgrim's Regress
6 " Instead of using their vastly increased material and technical resources to build a wonder-city, they built slums; and they thought it right and advisable to build slums because slums, on the test of private enterprise, " paid" , whereas the wonder-city would, they thought, have been an act of foolish extravagance, which would, in the imbecile idiom of the financial fashion, have " mortgaged the future" ; though how the construction to-day of great and glorious works can impoverish the future, no man can see until his mind is beset by false analogies from an irrelevant accountancy. "
7 " He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass. "
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
8 " We impoverish God in our minds when we say there must be answers to our prayers on the material plane the biggest answers to our prayers are in the realm of the unseen. "