Quote

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.

Adam Smith

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Adam Smith
Age: 67 †
Born: 1723
Born: June 16
Died: 1790
Died: July 17
Economist
Non-Fiction Writer
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Lang Toun
Find
Longer
Book
Grace
Take
Pleasure
Reading
Graces
Read
Novelty
Often
Amusement
Stills
Companion
Still
Poem

More quotes by Adam Smith

Image
Sugar, rum and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, which are become objects of almost universal consumption, and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.
Adam Smith
Image
Secrets in manufactures are capable of being longer kept than secrets in trade.
Adam Smith
Image
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
Adam Smith
Image
Capitals are increased by parsimony, and diminished by prodigalityand misconduct. By what a frugal man annually saves he not onlyaffords maintenance to an additional number of productive hands?but?he establishes as it were a perpetual fund for the maintenance of an equal number in all times to come.
Adam Smith
Image
No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
Adam Smith
Image
We are delighted to find a person who values us as we value ourselves, and distinguishes us from the rest of mankind, with an attention not unlike that with which we distinguish ourselves.
Adam Smith
Image
The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating.
Adam Smith
Image
China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.
Adam Smith
Image
Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another.
Adam Smith
Image
All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Adam Smith
Image
The game women play is men.
Adam Smith
Image
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.
Adam Smith
Image
Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man.
Adam Smith
Image
Justice, however, never was in reality administered gratis in any country. Lawyers and attornies, at least, must always be paid by the parties and, if they were not, they would perform their duty still worse than they actually perform it.
Adam Smith
Image
There is no art which government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.
Adam Smith
Image
The annual labour of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.
Adam Smith
Image
I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith
Image
The emotions of the spectator will still be very apt to fall short of the violence of what is felt by the sufferer. Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned.
Adam Smith
Image
The rate of profit... is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin.
Adam Smith
Image
Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor.
Adam Smith