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.
When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, have you grown old.
Be mindful of the words that you use and the actions that you live and who you are and how it is you use your power. Keep clear at all times that you are what you say you are.
Afflictive emotions - our jealousy, anger, hatred, fear - can be put to an end. When you realize that these emotions are only temporary, that they always pass on like clouds in the sky, you also realize they can ultimately be abandoned.
It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
The mintage of wisdom is to know that rest is rust, and that real life is love, laughter, and work.
If you survive long enough, you're revered - rather like an old building.
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