Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work
And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course — but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.
But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.
A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.