“Show me someone who isn’t a slave! One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to power, and all are slaves to fear. I could name a former Consul who is a slave to a little old woman, a millionaire who is the slave of the cleaning woman… No servitude is more abject than the self-imposed.”
Seneca, via The Daily Stoic (Page 287)
Greed Quotes
“The diseases of the rational soul are long-standing and hardened vices, such as greed and ambition—they have put the soul in a straitjacket and have begun to be permanent evils inside it. To put it briefly, this sickness is an unrelenting distortion of judgment, so things that are only mildly desirable are vigorously sought after.”
Seneca, Moral Letters, via The Daily Stoic (Page 93)
“Money is a loaded subject because man’s psychology is full of greed; otherwise, it is a simple means of exchanging things, a perfect means. There is nothing wrong in it, but the way we have worked it out, everything seems to be wrong. If you don’t have money, you are condemned; your whole life is a curse, and for your whole life, you are trying to get money by any means. If you have money, it does not change the basic thing: You still want more, and there is no end to wanting more. When finally, you have too much money—even though it is not enough, it is never enough, but it is more than anybody else has—then you start feeling guilty, because the means that you have used to accumulate the money are ugly, inhuman, violent.” ~ Osho, Fame, Fortune, and Ambition
“Greed is an effort to stuff yourself with something —it may be sex, it may be food, it may be money, it may be power. Greed is the fear of inner emptiness. One is afraid of being empty, and one wants somehow to possess more and more things. One wants to go on stuffing things inside so one can forget one’s emptiness. But to forget one’s emptiness is to forget one’s real self. To forget one’s emptiness is to forget the way to god. To forget one’s emptiness is the most stupid act in the world that a man is capable of.” ~ Osho, Fame, Fortune, and Ambition