1.
The American dream of rags to riches is a dream for a reason - it is hard to achieve; were everyone to do it, it wouldn't be a dream but would rather be reality.
Robert Fulton
The American fantasy of poverty to wealth is an aspiration for a purpose - it is arduous to accomplish; were everyone capable of doing so, it would not be an ideal but rather be fact.
2.
With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread.
Thomas Hood
3.
There is such a love, a love that creates value in what is loved. There is a love that turns rag dolls into priceless treasures. There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation. This is love beyond reason. This is the love of God.
John Ortberg
4.
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
John Donne
5.
How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — like rags and shreds of your very life.
Katherine Mansfield
6.
Sophia Loren would be a glamour girl even if she were in rags selling fish. She has the look, the movement and the intellect.
Hedy Lamarr
7.
FLAG, n. A colored rag borne above troops and hoisted on forts and ships. It appears to serve the same purpose as certain signs that one sees and vacant lots in London
Ambrose Bierce
8.
Adam had once told Gansey, "Rags to riches isn't a story anyone wants to hear until after it's done.
Maggie Stiefvater
9.
[Autobiographies] are all the same - it's always rags-to-riches or I-slept-with-so-and-so. Damned if I'm going to say that.
Deborah Kerr
10.
I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values.
Al Sharpton
11.
A man could be in a throne and have no attachment at all; another one could be in rags and have many attachments.
Swami Vivekananda
12.
We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
Angela Carter
13.
Like a robe wears out over time and turns to rags, life wears out from day to day, from second to second.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche
14.
Let me see you do the 'rag time dance'...
Turn left and do the 'Cake walk prance'...
Turn the other way and do the 'Slow drag'...
Now take your lady to the world's fair (...)
And do the 'rag time dance.'
Scott Joplin
15.
There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.
George Farquhar
16.
Rogues in rags are kept in countenance by rogues in ruffles.
Alexander Pope
17.
Fortune in men has some small diff'rence made,
One flaunts in rags, one flutters in brocade,
The cobbler apron'd, and the parson gown'd,
The friar hooded, and the monarch crown'd.
Alexander Pope
18.
Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all my ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
William Butler Yeats
19.
I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.
John Steinbeck
20.
My tears is tatted, my rag in my pocket / Im just looking for love, I know somebody got it
Jay-Z
21.
...I know all about myself now, I know. You've told me so often. You haven't left me one rag of illusion to clothe myself in.
Jean Rhys
22.
Through your rags I see your vanity.
Socrates
23.
The man forget not, though in rags he lies,
And know the mortal through a crown's disguise.
Mark Akenside
24.
You have to keep taking the next necessary stitch, and the next one, and the next. Without stitches, you just have rags. And we are not rags.
Anne Lamott
25.
For us the national flag is a rag to be planted on a dunghill. There are only two fatherlands in the world: that of the exploited and that of the exploiters.
Benito Mussolini
26.
While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.
Howard Zinn
27.
And so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.
Mark Twain
28.
Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well-proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters.
Lord Chesterfield
29.
Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Mark Twain
30.
It was funny actually because that was still during the time we were dating. He would get all these calls because supposedly before we broke up, we had already broken up in the trades, in the rags or whatever.
Rosario Dawson
31.
Oh, my tattered rags are caught on your coffee table.
Homer
32.
To one who habitually endeavors to contemplate the true state of things, the political state can hardly be said to have any existence whatever. It is unreal, incredible, and insignificant to him, and for him to endeavor to extract the truth from such lean material is like making sugar from linen rags, when sugar-cane may be had.
Henry David Thoreau
33.
Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is
a sort of spontaneous combustion--the oily rags of the head and heart.
Stanley Elkin
34.
Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.
Charles Dickens
35.
Raisa felt relieved, yet oddly disappointed. She was the blooded princess heir, yet in servants' clothes she was apparently unrecognizable. In the stories, rulers had a natural presence about them that identified them as such, even dressed in rags. What's the nature of royalty, she wondered. Is it like a gown you put on that disappears when you take it off? Does anyone look beyond the finery? Could anyone in the queendom take her place, given the right accessories? If so, it was contrary to everything she'd ever been taught about bloodlines.
Cinda Williams Chima
36.
Rags, which are the reproach of poverty, are the beggar's robes, and graceful insignia of his profession, his tenure, his full dress, the suit in which he is expected to show himself in public.
Charles Lamb
37.
The world's proverb is, "God help the poor, for the rich can help themselves;" but to our mind, it is just the rich who have most need of Heaven's help. Dives in scarlet is worse off than Lazarus in rags, unless Divine love shall uphold him.
Charles Spurgeon
38.
Treat kindly every miserable truth that knocks begging at your door, otherwise you will some day fail to recognize Truth Himself when He comes in rags.
Austin O'Malley
39.
Unselfishness is God. One may live on a throne, in a golden palace, and be perfectly unselfish; and then he is in God. Another may live in a hut and wear rags, and have nothing in the world; yet, if he is selfish, he is intensely merged in the world.
Swami Vivekananda
40.
Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
41.
Rags will always make their appearance where they have a right to do it.
Samuel Johnson
43.
The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.
Charles A. Reich
44.
Somebody has to go polish the stars, They're looking a little bit dull. Somebody has to go polish the stars, For the eagles and starlings and gulls Have all been complaining they're tarnished and worn, They say they want new ones we cannot afford. So please get your rags And your polishing jars, Somebody has to go polish the stars.
Shel Silverstein
45.
My life has often been described as 'from rags to riches' but in fact, the Ross's were never raggedy.
Diana Ross
46.
Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.
Joseph O'Connor
47.
Content with poverty, my soul I arm; And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.
John Dryden
48.
I record at the same place [Toe Rag or FatSounds Studios in London], with the same people [Liam Watson at Toe Rag and Ed Deegan at Fatsounds], every time. It makes it effortless, and another reason for the vast output when I do go in and record stuff.
Holly Golightly
49.
The haggardness of poverty is everywhere seen contrasted with the sleekness of wealth, the exhorted labour of some compensating for the idleness of others, wretched hovels by the side of stately colonnades, the rags of indigence blended with the ensigns of opulence; in a word, the most useless profusion in the midst of the most urgent wants.
Jean-Baptiste Say
50.
Beauty soaks reality as water fills a rag.
Chet Raymo