Greed

Greed (or avarice) is an uncontrolled longing for increase in the acquisition or use: of material gain (be it food, wealth, land, or animate/inanimate possessions); or social value, such as status, or power.

Quotes

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 53.

So for a good old-gentlemanly vice,
I think I must take up with avarice.
- Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto I, Stanza 216.

Avaritiam si tollere vultis, mater ejus est tollenda, luxuries.
- If you wish to remove avarice you must remove its mother, luxury.
- Cicero, De Oratore, II, 40.

Ac primam scelerum matrem, quæ semper habendo
Plus sitiens patulis rimatur faucibus aurum,
Trudis Avaritiam.
- Expel avarice, the mother of all wickedness, who, always thirsty for more, opens wide her jaws for gold.
- Claudianus, De Laudibus Stilichonis, II, 111.

Non propter vitam faciunt patrimonia quidam,
Sed vitio cæci propter patrimonia vivunt.
- Some men make fortunes, but not to enjoy them; for, blinded by avarice, they live to make fortunes.
- Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), XII, 50.

Crescit amor nummi quantum ipsa pecunia crescit.
- The love of pelf increases with the pelf.
- Juvenal, Satires (early 2nd century), XIV, 139.

That disease
Of which all old men sicken, avarice.
- Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl (1611), Act I, scene 1.

There grows,
In my most ill-compos'd affection such
A stanchless avarice, that, were I king,
I should cut off the nobles for their lands.
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act IV, scene 3, line 76.

This avarice
Strikes deeper, grows with more pernicious root.
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act IV, scene 3, line 84.

Desunt inopiæ multa, avaritiæ omnia.
- Poverty wants much; but avarice, everything.
- Publilius Syrus, Maxims, 441.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers

Quotes reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).

It is impossible to conceive any contrast more entire and absolute than that which exists between a heart glowing with love to God, and a heart in which the love of money has cashiered all sense of God — His love, His presence, His glory; and which is no sooner relieved from the mockery of a tedious round of religious formalism, than it reverts to the sanctuaries where its wealth is invested, with an intenseness of homage surpassing that of the most devout Israelite who ever, from a foreign land, turned his longing eyes toward Jerusalem.
- Richard Fuller, p. 20.

Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals —
- Anna Jameson, p. 20.

Objects close to the eye shut out much larger objects on the horizon; and splendors born only of the earth eclipse the stars. So a man sometimes covers up the entire disk of eternity with a dollar, and quenches transcendent glories with a little shining dust.
- Edwin Hubbell Chapin, p. 20.