THE YMBER PROJECT

Poverty makes a slave out of men. In order to eat he will accept work that gives no pleasure. All work that is not joyful is detestable, I thought. I said, do not work like that, it will bore you. I wished for everyone the kind of leisure without which no novelties, no vice, no art would blossom.

But remember, you can’t fix everything in the world for everybody.

To despise riches, may, indeed, be philosophic, but to dispense them worthily, surely, must be more beneficial to mankind.

I quote others only to better express myself.

There is nothing in the world so fashionable as taking no notice of things, and never seeing people, and saying nothing at all, and never hearing a word, and not knowing one’s own acquaintance, and always finding fault…

It’s a delightful thing to think of perfection; but it’s vastly more amusing to talk of errors and absurdities.

If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.