Avarice
idea · 4 works · 7 mentions · 11 anchored passages
avarice · greed · money-lust · pecuniary fanaticism · the love of wealth
in the texts
Letters to Lucilius
Greed for wealth or possessions
How far will you extend the bounds of your estates?
As there is much difference between avarice and money, since the one desires, the other is desired, so between philosophy and wisdom.
He teaches me to reckon, and lends my fingers to avarice, rather than teach me that these computations have nothing to do with the matter, that a man is not happier whose estate wearies the accountants;
Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated
The passion for wealth and property, identified as the root cause of oppression that governmental sovereignty over property enables.
Oppression is universally caused by pecuniary fanaticism.
Yet pecuniary fanaticism or exclusive privileges, can abhor a resort to force, and admire a resort to fraud for the same purpose.
By the confidence derived from representation, united with the power of a sovereignty in the government over property, avarice is enabled to draw from the people all they can possibly spare.
Tusculan Disputations
The disease of the mind arising from unchecked craving for money, used as the recurring paradigm case of a mental disease.
that inhospitality is a vehement opinion that a guest is greatly to be fled, and that clinging and deeply implanted;
But avarice is a vehement opinion about money, as though it were greatly to be sought, clinging and deeply implanted;
For when money has been coveted, and reason has not at once been applied, like a certain Socratic medicine, to heal that desire, the evil penetrates into the veins and clings in the inward parts, and there arises a disease and sickness, which, when inveterate, cannot be plucked out;
On Anger
A vice of greed for wealth, cited as another false claimant to greatness of mind
let avarice, too, seem of a great mind—it broods over heaps of gold and silver, farms whole estates that bear the names of provinces, and under single overseers holds wider bounds than those the consuls drew by lot;