Poverty makes you wise but it's a curse.
Interpretation
Poverty can teach valuable lessons about life, but it also brings significant hardships.
This quote by Bertolt Brecht suggests that experiencing poverty can lead to a deeper understanding of life and the human condition, fostering wisdom. However, it also highlights the negative aspects of poverty, portraying it as a curse that brings suffering and challenges, despite the potential for personal growth through adversity.
In practice
In a discussion about socioeconomic status, one might use the quote to emphasize the dual nature of poverty.
The shrill voices of those who give orders Are full of fear like the squeakings of Piglets awaiting the butcher's knife, as their fat arses Sweat with anxiety in their office chairs.... Fear rules not only those who are ruled, but The rulers too.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his or her own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other's faces.
Anything that is secret and mysterious in this system of Yoga should be at once rejected. The best guide in life is strength. In spirituality, as in all other matters, discard everything that weakens you. Have nothing to do with it. Mystery-mongering weakens the human brain. It has well-nigh destroyed Yoga, one of the grandest of sciences
Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible.
There is no such thing as genius, some children are just less damaged than others.
We live in a world which respects power above all things. Power, intelligently directed, can lead to more freedom. Unwisely directed, it can be a dreadful, destructive force.
It is good to follow one's own bent, so long as it leads upward.
Inner peace doesn't come from getting what we want, but from remembering who we are.
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