Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
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He always looked forward to the evening drives through the centre of Shanghai, this electric and lurid city, more exciting than any other in the world. As they reached the Bubbling Well Road he pressed his face to the windshield and gazed at the pavements lined with night-clubs and gambling dens, crowded with bar-girls and gangsters and rich beggars with their bodyguards. Crowds of gamblers pushed their way into the jai alai stadiums, blocking the traffic in the Bubbling Well Road. An armoured police van with two Thompson guns mounted in a steel turret above the driver swung in front of the Packard and cleared the pavement. A party of young Chinese women in sequinned dresses tripped over a child's coffin decked with paper flowers. Arms linked together, they lurched against the radiator grille of the Packard and swayed past Jim's window, slapping the windshield with their small hands and screaming obscenities. Nearby, along the windows of the Sun Sun department store in the Nanking Road, a party of young European jews were fighting in and out of the strolling crowds with a gang of older German boys in the swastika armbands of the Graf Zeppelin Club. Chased by the police sirens, they ran through the entrance of the Cathay Theatre, the world's largest cinema, where a crowd of Chinese shopgirls and typists, beggars and pickpockets spilled in the street to watch people arriving for the evening performance. As they stepped from their limousines the women steered their long skirts through the honour guard of fifty hunchbacks in mediaeval costume. Three months earlier, when his parents had taken Jim to the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there had been two hundred hunchbacks, recruited by the management of the theatre from every back alley in Shanghai. As always, the spectacle outside the theatre for exceeded anything shown on its screen.
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All strangers and beggars are from Zeus, and a gift, though small, is precious.
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Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.
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...So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.
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When beggars and shoeshine boys, barbers and beauticians can tell you how to get rich it is time to remind yourself that there is no more dangerous illusion than the belief that one can get something for nothing.
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Conceit, more rich in matter than in words, brags of his substance: they are but beggars who can count their worth.
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True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.
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Somehow he Tim gets thoughtful sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant for them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.
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Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books.
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A court is an assembly of noble and distinguished beggars.
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When beggars die there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
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Beggars should be entirely abolished! Truly, it is annoying to give to them and annoying not to give to them.
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At Ramana's ashram, he established the rule that 1st would be fed the animals, then the beggars, next the visitors, succeeded by the ashram residents. Finally when all else had eaten, Ramana took food.
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If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
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Where art thou, death? Come hither, come! Come, come, and take a queen Worth many babes and beggars!
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If beggars do not hate the rest of us, they are even more abject than I had imagined.
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