"Penny-wise" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wonderful what people, penny-wise and pound foolish, will sometimes do to save 2d. A few years back the sealing-wax on a letter was found to contain L1 10s. in gold coins. There could hardly be a more stupid way of ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... rich and poor) punishes the non-attendance of a Bohra at the daily prayers. A large sum is exacted for remissness during the Ramazan, and it is said that the dread of loss operates powerfully upon a class of men who are particularly penny-wise. The money collected thus is transmitted by the Ujjain Mullah to his chief at Surat, who devotes it to religious purposes such as repairing or building mosques, assisting the needy of his subjects and the like. Several other offences have the same characteristic punishment, such as fornication, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... teaches to Takes Care of the Pence and the Pounds will Take Care of Themselves, and that we Should Not Be Penny-Wise and Pound-Foolish. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... believed that a trivial error of the press mainly conduced to occasion this hostility? Our poor author had been weak enough to "deprecate censure" in his penny-wise humility, and the printer had negatived his meaning as above: "hinc illae lachrymae." Oh, but how the ragged tooth of calumny gnawed his ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... cite Shakespeare for his purpose. 'Never put off till to-morrow what you can do to-day' agrees ill with 'Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof'; and it is somewhat difficult to reconcile 'Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves' with the equally familiar 'Penny-wise, pound-foolish.' Yet the sayings are equally untrue; any maxim is, perforce, a general statement, and therefore fallacious, and therefore universally accepted. Art is long, and life is short, but the platitudes concerning them are both insufferable and eternal. We must remember that a general ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... make, and it is no unusual thing for them to amount to fifty or sixty guineas at a time. More is to be performed by way of negotiation, many times, at one of these entertainments, than at twenty serious conversations; but the policy of our country has been, and still is, to be penny-wise and pound-foolish. We stand in sufficient need of economy, and in the curtailment of other salaries I suppose they thought it absolutely necessary to cut off their foreign ministers. But, my own interest apart, the system is bad; for that nation which degrades their own ministers ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... because thereby they lose their own souls; 'What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?' (Mark 8:36). He loseth then, he loseth greatly that getteth after this fashion. This is the man that is penny-wise and pound-foolish; this is he that loseth his good sheep for a half-penny-worth of tar;[52] that loseth a soul for a little of the world. And then what doth he get thereby but loss and damage? Thus he getteth or rather loseth about the world to come. But what doth he get in this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... as symbols of that unfathomable cosmic cruelty which he sees as the motive power of life itself. More, even, than his women, he makes them poignant, vivid, memorable. The picture of old Gerhardt is full of a subtle brightness, though he is always in the background, as cautious and penny-wise as an ancient crow, trotting to his Lutheran church, pathetically ill-used by the world he never understands. Butler is another such, different in externals, but at bottom the same ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken |
