Frugality Quotes

“I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.”
― Lao Tzu

“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.”
― John Stuart Mill

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six , result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“There is no dignity
quite so impressive,
and no independence
quite so important,
as living within your means.”
― Calvin Coolidge

“I’M LOSING FAITH IN MY FAVORITE COUNTRY

Throughout my life, the United States has been my favorite country, save and except for Canada, where I was born, raised, educated, and still live for six months each year. As a child growing up in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, I aggressively bought and saved baseball cards of American and National League players, spent hours watching snowy images of American baseball and football games on black and white television and longed for the day when I could travel to that great country. Every Saturday afternoon, me and the boys would pay twelve cents to go the show and watch U.S. made movies, and particularly, the Superman serial. Then I got my chance. My father, who worked for B.F. Goodrich, took my brother and me to watch the Cleveland Indians play baseball in the Mistake on the Lake in Cleveland. At last I had made it to the big time. I thought it was an amazing stadium and it was certainly not a mistake. Amazingly, the Americans thought we were Americans.

I loved the United States, and everything about the country: its people, its movies, its comic books, its sports, and a great deal more. The country was alive and growing. No, exploding. It was the golden age of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American dream was alive and well, but demanded hard work, honesty, and frugality. Everyone understood that. Even the politicians.

Then everything changed.

Partly because of its proximity to the United States and a shared heritage, Canadians also aspired to what was commonly referred to as the American dream. I fall neatly into that category. For as long as I can remember I wanted a better life, but because I was born with a cardboard spoon in my mouth, and wasn’t a member of the golden gene club, I knew I would have to make it the old fashioned way: work hard and save. After university graduation I spent the first half of my career working for the two largest oil companies in the world: Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. The second half was spent with one of the smallest oil companies in the world: my own.

Then I sold my company and retired into obscurity. In my case obscurity was spending summers in our cottage on Lake Rosseau in Muskoka, Ontario, and winters in our home in Port St. Lucie, Florida. My wife, Ann, and I, (and our three sons when they can find the time), have been enjoying that “obscurity” for a long time. During that long time we have been fortunate to meet and befriend a large number of Americans, many from Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation.” One was a military policeman in Tokyo in 1945. After a very successful business carer in the U.S. he’s retired and living the dream. Another American friend, also a member of the “Greatest Generation”, survived The Battle of the Bulge and lived to drink Hitler’s booze at Berchtesgaden in 1945. He too is happily retired and living the dream. Both of these individuals got to where they are by working hard, saving, and living within their means. Both also remember when their Federal Government did the same thing.

One of my younger American friends recently sent me a You Tube video, featuring an impassioned speech by Marco Rubio, Republican senator from Florida. In the speech, Rubio blasts the spending habits of his Federal Government and deeply laments his country’s future. He is outraged that the U.S. Government spends three hundred billion dollars, each and every month. He is even more outraged that one hundred and twenty billion of that three hundred billion dollars is borrowed. In other words, Rubio states that for every dollar the U.S. Government spends, forty cents is borrowed. I don’t blame him for being upset. If I had run my business using that arithmetic, I would be in the soup kitchens. If individual American families had applied that arithmetic to their finances, none of them would be in a position to pay a thin dime of taxes.”
― Stephen Douglass

“Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.”
― Elise Boulding

“he who will not economize will have to agonize”
― Confucius

“The way to wealth is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality: that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them everything.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least you will, by such conduct, stand the be.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“What a pair they were - a Mistborn who felt guilty wasting coins to jump and a nobleman who thought balls were too expensive.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.”
― M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

“Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one’s self?”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Frugality, I've learned, has its own cost, one that sometimes lasts forever.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding

“He that will not stoop for a pin will never be worth a pound.”
― Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys

“These days, you’ve gotta milk a
dollar out of every dime.”
― Gayle Forman, Where She Went

“I do have an interest in this book, which is for sale. (If you have bought it, dear reader, I thank you. If you have borrowed it, I honor your frugality. If you have stolen it, may it add to your confusion.)”
― Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays

“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.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Rambler: In Four Volumes

“We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but the grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“They just want to know what we stand for; our spending choices is one way that we articulate this.”
― Ron Lieber, The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money

“When you have been a victim of constant hunger, you learn how to stop wasting food.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“But even if they did have that kind of money rattling around in their pockets, actually spending it would offend their native frugality.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

“We were very much a reading family, but we were a borrow-a-book-from-the-library family more than a bookshelves-full-of-books family. My parents valued books, but they grew up in the Depression, aware of the quicksilver nature of money, and they learned the hard way that you shouldn't buy what you could borrow. Because of that frugality, or perhaps independent of it, they also believed that you read a book for the experience of reading it.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“Answer me this, if your TV wasn’t broken in the first place then why do you need a
new one? If your clothes still fit and aren’t rags falling off you, why do you need
more clothes? If your phone still does what it does, why do you need the newest
brand out there? I could go on with these examples, but you get the gist. If it isn’t
broken then why fix it? I just had to throw one more in there for ya.”
― Harken Headers, Health & Not Screwing It Up

“Only buy what you need. Think function not fashion”
― Harken Headers, Health & Not Screwing It Up

“Hell, you ought to go see a doctor, Dad," I told him. "You probably just need some kind of pep-up medicine. Why do you want to be so contrary?" "I ain't contrary," he said. "I just don't want to pay no doctor to tell me what I already know. There ain't no medicine for old age." "You're just tight," I said. "You ought not to let a few dollars stand between you and your health." "I am tight," he said. "I'm rich, too." "You don't live like it," I said. "No, because I want to stay rich. The best way in the world to get poor is to start living rich.”
― Larry McMurtry, Leaving Cheyenne

“I’ll eventually replace my charity clothes with things I’ll buy for myself, but not until I’ve worn them through.”
― Jennifer Cody, The Trouble with Trying to Date a Murderer

“We’re taught we can pay for everything we need. Our very lives can be purchased, and by extension, we can buy the rights to a fragmented community of like-minded consumers. Our unifying activity as a culture is shopping, and the one thing we all are is consumers.”
― Elizabeth Willard Thames, Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living

“आणि युरोपी संवेदनवर्चस्वामुळे आलेली रोगट स्वच्छता साबण, पावडरी, छानछोकी? एका बादलीत सगळे घाण कपडे आधी खंगाळून मग दुसऱ्या एका स्वच्छ पाण्याच्या बादलीत ते धुऊन काढणं- साबणाची गरज काय? ह्या बगळ्यासारखा शुभ्र रंगापेक्षा गांधी विनोबा यांच्या खादीच्या धोतरांचे पिवळट रंग निर्मळ नव्हते? हात धुवायला राख काय वाईट? केसांना काळी माती? शिकेकाई? आणि बायकांची स्वयंपाकातली उर्जेची बचत ? बिजा, एकदम सगळी लाकडं चुलीत ढोसू नको. एकेक लावत राहा. पुढे भाकरी होईपर्यंत मागच्या भानचुलीवर वरण ठेव. तिकडे चूल गरम राहते, तिथे दूध ठेव. छबू, स्वैपाक झाला की लगेच लाकडांवर पाणी टाक, कोळसा तरी मिळेल. आहारावर दूध तापत राहील, साय चांगली येते. लाडके, राख साठवून ठेव. भांडी घासायला चांगली राख काढून ठेव. बाकीची उकिरड्यावर. पोरांनो, पेल्याला तोंड न लावता वरून पाणी प्या, तेवढीच मोरीत भांडी कमी पडतात, भावडू, अरे इतकं कडक पाणी आंघोळीला? ताजं आडाचं पाणी एकदा घेऊ पाहा आंगावर... किती छान गरम असतं.”
― Bhalchandra Nemade, हिंदू

“The funeral carriage went slowly. It looked quite expensive, but that was Cockbill Street for you. People put money by. Vimes remembered that. You always put money by, in Cockbill Street. You saved up for a rainy day even if it was pouring already. And you'd die of shame if people thought you could afford only a cheap funeral.”
― Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

“The salesman told Anna that it was pointless to try to rip off his customers, because of everything a Sichuanese person must have gone through in order to accumulate enough money for a Porsche. “The people who are capable of buying luxury cars have exhausted every means to earn profits and they have coped with all kinds of people,” he said. “It’s impossible to deceive them.”
― Peter Hessler