Wealth In Economy : Part 1

Architects of Fate: Steps to Success and Power
by Orison Swett Marden

(Page 12 of 19)

Economy is half the battle of life. - Spurgeon.

Economy is the parent of integrity, of liberty and ease, and the beauteous sister of temperance, of cheerfulness and health. - Dr. Johnson.

As much wisdom can be expended on a private economy as on an empire. - Emerson.

Riches amassed in haste will diminish; but those collected by hand and little by little will multiply. - Goethe.

No gain is so certain as that which proceeds from the economical use of what you have. - Latin Proverb.

Beware of little extravagances: a small leak will sink a big ship. - Franklin.

Better go to bed without a dinner than rise with debts. - German Proverb.

Debt is like any other trap, easy enough to get into, but hard enough to get out of. - H. W. Shaw.

Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteen pence a day; but for fantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice. - Macaulay.

Economy, the poor man's mint. - Tupper.

I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers and lingers it out; but the disease is incurable. - Shakespeare.

Whatever be your talents, whatever be your prospects, never speculate away on the chance of a palace that which you may need as a provision against the workhouse. - Bulwer.

Not for to hide it in a hedge,
Nor for a train attendant,
But for the glorious privilege
Of being independent. Burns.

"We shan't get much here," whispered a lady to her companion, as John Murray blew out one of the two candles by whose light he had been writing when they asked him to contribute to some benevolent object. He listened to their story and gave one hundred dollars. "Mr. Murray, I am very agreeably surprised," said the lady quoted; "I did not expect to get a cent from you." The old Quaker asked the reason for her opinion; and, when told, said, "That, ladies, is the reason I am able to let you have the hundred dollars. It is by practicing economy that I save up money with which to do charitable actions. One candle is enough to talk by."

Emerson relates the following anecdote: "An opulent merchant in Boston was called on by a friend in behalf of a charity. At that time he was admonishing his clerk for using whole wafers instead of halves; his friend thought the circumstance unpropitious; but to his surprise, on listening to the appeal, the merchant subscribed five hundred dollars. The applicant expressed his astonishment that any person who was so particular about half a wafer should present five hundred dollars to a charity; but the merchant said, "It is by saving half wafers, and attending to such little things, that I have now something to give."

"How did you acquire your great fortune?" asked a friend of Lampis, the ship-owner. "My great fortune, easily," was the reply, "my small one, by dint of exertion."

Four years from the time Marshould Field left the rocky New England farm to seek his fortune in Chicago he was admitted as a partner in the firm of Coaley, Farwell & Co. The only reason the modest young man gave, to explain his promotion when he had neither backing, wealth, nor influence, was that he saved his money.

If a man will begin at the age of twenty and lay by twenty-six cents every working day, investing at seven percent. compound interest, he will have thirty-two thousand dollars when he is seventy years old. Twenty cents a day is no unusual expenditure for beer or cigars, yet in fifty years it would easily amount to twenty thousand dollars. Even a saving of one dollar a week from the date of one's majority would give him one thousand dollars for each of the last ten of the allotted years of life. "What maintains one vice would bring up two children."

Such rigid economy, such high courage, enables one to surprise the world with gifts even if he is poor. In fact, the poor and the middle classes give most in the aggregate to missions and hospitals and to the poor. Only frugality enables them to outdo the rich on their own ground.

But miserliness or avariciousness is a different thing from economy. The miserly is the miserable man, who hoards money from a love of it. A miser who spends a cent upon himself where another would spend a quarter does it from parsimony, which is a subordinate characteristic of avarice. Of this the following is an illustration: "True, I should like some soup, but I have no appetite for the meat," said the dying Ostervalde; "what is to become of that? It will be a sad waste." And so the rich Paris banker would not let his servant buy meat for broth.

A writer on political economy tells of the mishaps resulting from a broken latch on a farmyard gate. Every one going through would shut the gate, but as the latch would not hold it, it would swing open with every breeze. One day a pig ran out into the woods. Every one on the farm went to help get him back. A gardener jumped over a ditch to stop the pig, and sprained his ankle so badly as to be confined to his bed for two weeks. When the cook returned, she found that her linen, left to dry at the fire, was all badly scorched. The dairymaid in her excitement left the cows untied, and one of them broke the leg of a colt. The gardener lost several hours of valuable time. Yet a new latch would not have cost five cents.

Copyright, 1895 by Orison Swett Marden.
All Rights Reserved.