Tao Te Ching
Greed
Most might normally think about greed as an uncontrollable passion. Anther way of looking at it, however, could be a a believed deception. Like consumerism and materialism in general, the foundation is believing that some form of happiness will arise from getting more. Based on the false belief in “basic badness” and ignoring our true nature, it sets our sights on goals that never gain our true desires, gaining ideas that only lead us into more confusion, and suffering. When we experience the meaningless emptiness of continually chasing after fame, fortune, pleasure, and power; our materialistic attitudes dissolve by themselves and we begin to discover the profound brilliance, the sacredness of life. Believing the advertising and taking on the role of the donkey always chasing the unreachable carrot, we chase after material things, dedicate our lives to making money and only burden ourselves with anxiety and worry.
Quotes (82)
“Blessed are the man and the woman who have grown beyond their greed and have put an end to their hatred and no longer nourish illusions.”
“Discontent springs from a constant endeavor to increase the amount of our claims, when we are powerless to increase the amount which will satisfy them.”
“The ignorant and simple-minded burn with the fires of greed, anger and folly. Obsessed with ideas of birth, growth and destruction, they fall into the habit of grasping becoming fixated and attached.”
“When you do not crave what is useless, you do not hurt your nature by greed... If you are endlessly greedy and ambitious, then penalties will kill you.”
“The rich have become so unsocial, those who own property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who are in power circumstance would less gladly find a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich.”
“Only hypocritical, greedy, and criminal leaders create the causes of crime and then punish the people for it.”
“Avarice of the old... how absurd to increase one's baggage as one nears their journey's end.”
“In the 1950s, a typical CEO made 20 times the salary of his or her average worker. Last year, CEO pay at an S&P 500 Index firm soared to an average of 361 times more than the average rank-and-file worker, or pay of $13,940,000 a year ($13,940,000 divided by 261 = $53,410 per day).”
“How slight and insignificant is the thing which casts down or restores a mind greedy for praise.”
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
“There is no need to yearn, envy, and grab... Diogenes and Heraclitus were impeccable models of living by such principles rather than by raw impulse.”
“The ignorant mind, with its infinite afflictions, passions, and evils, is rooted in the three poisons. Greed, anger, and delusion.”
“A greedy man who piles up wealth
is like an owl who loves her chicks
the chicks grow up and eat their mother.
Wealth eventually swallows its owner.
Spread it around and blessings grow.”
“I made a great feast in the joss house, but the hungry gods are never satisfied.”
“If you yourself are unable to be fulfilled,
Your greedy rich man's mind will never be satisfied.”
“Losing something is the result of possessing something. How can people lose what they don't possess?”
“Many winds full of anger, lust and greed move rubbish around. The solid mountain of true nature however, stays where it's always been.”
“Pride, envy, avarice—these are the sparks that set on fire the hearts of a all men.”
“Always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment's peace, we are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety.”
“Above all things, good policy is to prevent treasuries and monies in a state from being gathered into a few hands.”
“Personal prejudice and financial greed are the two great evils that threaten courts of law, and once they get the upper hand they immediately hamstring society, by destroying all justice.”
“The Way of Heaven is to give but not to take The Way of Humankind is to take but not to give.”
“Robbers and thieves arise from hunger and cold. If people are hungry and have no means to live, they have no choice but to steal. When people steal, it’s because those above force them..”
“As Lao-tzu says: ‘Know your limits and you’ll suffer no disgrace, know when to stop and you’ll be in no danger.’ Let no man take too much.”
“Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”
“Delusion and enlightenment produce one another… You get rid of this, then grab hold of that. Don’t you see how stupid it is!”
“every man has a horizon of his own, and he will expect as much as he thinks it is possible for him to get.”
“Others will enjoy the wealth we as misers kept. Even our body we hold so dear will be left behind.”
“… men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon polished into the soil for compost… they are employed laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.”
“The most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest”
“From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.”
“All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.”
“There are many things that we would throw away, if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.”
“I could see that the Wasichus [white man] did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. This could not be better than the old ways of my people.”
“In its ealy stage, love is shaped by desire; later on it is kept alive only by anxiety... It is born and it thrives only if something remains to be won. We love only what we do not completely possess.”
“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident… they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”
“And all the greedy gushes out through their small souls. And all the lazy leaks down over their brash bodies. How small it's all!”
“insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory - if only in the blood - of a time when the test of survival (as now between states) was the ability to kill.”
“Above all, [capitalism] seems by its very nature to stimulate repeated concentrations of wealth, leading to contractions of purchasing power and to depressions... Repeatedly in history, this natural concentration of wealth has led to a pathological, almost cancerous condition.”
“This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.”
“Deception arises when I want, when I am greedy, when I say, 'All experience is hollow, I want something mysterious'—then I am caught.”
“Greed has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome.”
“Desire killed that man, as desire has killed many before and after him If this earth should ever be destroyed, it will be by desire, by the lust of pleasure and self-gratification, by greed.”
“In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of ‘the common good’ and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed.”
“The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.”
“How can we disarm greed and envy? Perhaps by being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptation of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinizing our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced.”
“Ignorance, hatred and greed are killing nature.”
“As a matter of simple logic, there's no difference at all, that I can see, between the man who's greedy for material treasure or even intellectual treasure—and the man who's greedy for spiritual treasure.”
“To try to extinguish the drive for riches with money is like trying to quench a fire by pouring butter over it.”
“To accumulate wealth, power or land beyond one's needs in a limited world is to be truly immoral, be it as an individual, an institution, or a nation-state.”
“Appeals to the base lusts that hide in everyone no matter how respectable on the surface. Yes, the novelist knows humanity, how worthless they are , ruled by their testicles, swayed by cowardice, selling out every cause because of their greed”
“To lose the sense of sacredness of the world is a mortal loss. To injure our world by excesses of greed and ingenuity is to endanger our own sacredness.”
“downstream in this river of life, our children will pay for our selfishness, for our greed, and for our lack of vision.”
“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”
“No one is ever wealthy enough, honored enough, applauded enough. On the contrary, the visibility of our victories only tightens the grip of the failures in our invisible past.”
“I understood why… their children, inevitably, took those things for granted… Hence the materialistic and often greedy and selfish lifestyle of so many young people in the Western world, especially in the United States. ” 
“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all — by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians — be participating in its destruction?”
“When the focus of your practice becomes like the light of the sun penetrating a magnifying glass so sharply that it makes a fire, it dissolves greed, anger, and ignorance, the three great obstacles to our original heart/mind.”
“Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do…
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...”
“Let me ask you one question,
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness?
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.”
“health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are — that's all you need”
“Struck by the arrows of greed, we don’t see that it is our own desire for conveniences… that actually supports the wars that are devastating our world.”
“Above all, may individuals recognize that it is their greatest personal responsibility to implement the protection of the world's environment... May they crush the egotism and unlimited avarice that are our mighty foes in this degenerate age.”
“If it were not for certain people's greed for wealth, the highways would be filled with cars powered by the sun, and no one would be starving. Such advances are technologically and physically possible, but apparently not emotionally possible.”
“the more we have, the bigger our fences, the more sophisticated our security to keep people away and the less we want to share.”
“The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’”
“Smith's claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profit is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history... What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.”
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