Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Extravagance

An extravagant man, who has nothing else to recommend him but a false generosity, is often more beloved than a person of a much more finished character, who is defective in this particular.

The injury of prodigality leads to this, that he that will not economize will have to agonize.

He that is extravagant will quickly become poor; and poverty will enforce dependence and invite corruption.

A miser grows rich by seeming poor; an extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich.

Prodigality and dissipation at last bring a man to the want of the necessaries of life; he falls into poverty, misery, and abject disgrace; so that even his acquaintance, fearful of being obliged to restore to him what he has squandered with them or upon him, fly from him as a debtor from his creditors, and he is left abandoned by all the world.

“He that is plentiful in expenses of all kinds will hardly be preserved from decay.” [Bacon’s Essay, Of Expense.] Obviously true as this is, yet it is apparently completely overlooked by the imprudent spendthrift, who, finding that he is able to afford this, or that, or the other, expense, forgets that all of them together will ruin him. This is what, in logical language, is called the “Fallacy of Composition.”