I am nothing but I must be everything.
Karl MarxRead
While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques both capitalism and miserliness, suggesting that extreme forms of both can distort rational behavior.
In this quote, Karl Marx contrasts the characteristics of a miser with those of a capitalist, arguing that while the miser is driven to madness by unhealthy greed and obsession with wealth, the capitalist maintains a rational approach to accumulation of wealth. However, both extremes reflect a flawed relationship with money and resources, highlighting the need for a more balanced perspective in economic practices.
Themes
CapitalismMiserWealthGreedEconomicsRationality
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about the ethical implications of capitalism in modern society.
More from Karl Marx
All quotes βReligion is the opiate of the people.
Karl MarxRead
It is absolutely impossible to transcend the laws of nature. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws expose themselves.
Karl MarxRead
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
Karl MarxRead
To be radical is to grasp things by the root.
Karl MarxRead
Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.
Karl MarxRead
Similar quotes
Prepare yourself for the coming astral journey of death by daily riding in the balloon of God-perception. Through delusion you are perceiving yourself as a bundle of flesh and bones, which at best is a nest of troubles. Meditate unceasingly, that you may quickly behold yourself as the Infinite Essence, free from every form of misery. Cease being a prisoner of the body; using the secret key of KRIYA, learn to escape into Spirit.
Lahiri MahasayaRead
Make tawba not just for sins you've committed, but also for obligations you haven't fulfilled.
Ibn TaymiyyahRead
In those days it was possible for a Greek to flee from an over-abundant reality as though it were but the tricky scheming off the imagination-and to flee, not like Plato into the land of eternal ideas, into the workshop off the world-creator, feasting one's eyes on the unblemished unbreakable archetypes, but into the rigor mortis off the coldest emptiest concept off all, the concept of being.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. --as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS
Abraham LincolnRead
I support all people on earth who have bodies like and unlike my body.
Naomi Shihab NyeRead
Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity; let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
Vladimir NabokovRead