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.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
I got a fortune cookie that said, "To remember is to understand." I have never forgotten it. A good judge remembers what it was like to be a lawyer. A good editor remembers being a writer. A good parent remembers what it was like to be a child.
If it's still in your mind, it is still in your heart.
The wise man makes an island of himself that no flood can overwhelm.
Knowledge enormous makes a God of me._x000D_ _x000D_ Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,_x000D_ _x000D_ Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,_x000D_ _x000D_ Creations and destroyings, all at once_x000D_ _x000D_ Pour into the wide hollows of my brain,_x000D_ _x000D_ And deify me, as if some blithe wine_x000D_ _x000D_ Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk,_x000D_ _x000D_ And so become immortal.
The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted.
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