Parsimonious meaning

Adjective: parsimonious

Pronunciation: (paa(r)-su’mow-nee-us)

Parsimonious meaning: Excessively unwilling to spend money. Exhibited or marked by parsimony.

Synonyms: miserly, penurious, niggardly, penny-pinching, cheese-paring, close-fisted, ungenerous, tightwad

Adverb: parsimoniously

Quotations: Henry Ward Beecher – By labor the North has subdued nature, changed a parsimonious soil to fertility, built dwellings for almost her whole population, raised the school-house, established the Church, encircled the globe with her ships, and made her books and her papers to be as blades of grass and as leave of the Summer for number. But in the South, labor, a badge of shame, is the father of misery. The slave labors, but with no cheer, it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank and earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment.

Edmund Burke – Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

Marilynne Robinson – Earthly nature may be parsimonious, but the human mind is prodigal, itself an anomaly that in its wealth of error as well as of insight is exceptional, utterly unique as far as we know, properly an object of wonder.

Livy – There is nothing worse than being ashamed of parsimony or poverty.

Giulio Andreotti – My father died when I was two years old. But my mother was quite capable. She raised three children with his war pension which was peanuts. Yet we did not want for anything. We grew up with certain parsimony, which is a nice thing. Then if life gives you more good, otherwise you get used to. I’m still thrifty.

Adam Smith – Capitals are increased by parsimony, and diminished by prodigality and misconduct. By what a frugal man annually saves he not only affords maintenance to an additional number of productive hands?

Sample sentences:

1. They are neither extravagant nor parsimonious. They are very mean.
2. Benefit reductions in a system that’s already parsimonious is not desirable.
3. Among the propensities of human nature which almost exceed understanding, come the parsimony of the rich and the extravagance of the poor.
4. If time is money, it seems moral to save time, above all one’s own, and such parsimony is excused by consideration for others. One is straight-forward.
5. Nothing perhaps has so retarded the reception of the higher conclusions of Geology among men in general, as the instinctive parsimony of the human mind in matters where time is concerned.
6. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and a higher economy. Economy is a distinctive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection.
7. It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.
8. What in the rising man was industry and economy becomes in the rich man parsimony and avarice.
9. Parsimony is enough to make the master of the golden mines as poor as he that has nothing; for a man may be brought to a morsel of bread by parsimony as well as profusion.
10. The principle of parsimony is valid aesthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose.