Carmen Dell'Orefice

There's no way I would have got to see so much of the world, with my humble background, without modelling. We were penniless and hungry for most of my youth. I washed the sheets in the bathtub in my bedroom and hung them out of the window on the clothes line, which in winter was difficult as the sheets would freeze and get stuck to the line.

American Model

Susan Hayward

My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy, penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my way up in a town called Hollywood where people love to trample you to death. I don't relax because I don't know how. I don't want to know how. Life is too short to relax.

American Actress

Christopher McCandless

Tramping is too easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to forage around for my next meal... I've decided that I'm going to live this life for some time to come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up.

American Explorer

Abraham Lincoln

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

American President

Jose Jose

Just two years after hitting the top, I hit the bottom. I found myself penniless, deathly ill and getting a divorce. It was all a result of my ignorance. I didn't know how to handle everything that hit me at once.

Mexican Musician

Pearl White

The thing you've got to watch for is going broke when you're old. Look at all the people that go down and out at the finish. The man who built my country place is blind now and penniless. That's terrible!

American Musician

W. E. B. Du Bois

The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class.

American Writer

John Leguizamo

Every dad who loves his daughter is not going to want her to go with the penniless slacker loser poet bum, when she could go out with someone who's successful.

Colombian Comedian

Orison Swett Marden

Whoever uplifts civilization is rich though he die penniless, and future generations will erect his monument.

Ryan Tedder

When I moved to L.A., I was penniless, absolutely beyond broke and in debt up to my eyeballs.

The term evokes sympathy or sadness, suggesting extreme poverty or misfortune.

Emotional Weight

'Penniless' often implies a lack of resources beyond just money, like support or assets.

Not Just Broke

Can refer to a momentary situation, not necessarily a permanent condition.

Temporary State

 There was an energy there, an implacable optimism, a strange mixture of humility and daring. So I followed my hunches. I gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label "It can't be done" was an irresistible challenge. For a year, we were penniless.

Tan Le: My immigration...

 optimism a strange mixture of humility and daring so I followed my hunches I gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label it can't be done was an irresistible challenge for a year we were penniless at the end of

My immigration story -...

 later Lee wakes up from his coma to find he's in big trouble with the cops disabled penniless and alone Lee has no option but to cooperate with the feds