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 Poverty Makes All Unhappy

(See pages 106, 491, 752, 756)

For my own part, I will put up with this state of things, passively, not an hour longer. I am not an unselfish person, nor an evangelical one; I have no particular pleasure in doing good; neither do I dislike doing it so much as to expect to be rewarded for it in another world. But I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do anything else I like, and the very light of the morning sky has become hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly.

The One Duty

(From "The Measure of the Hours")

(Belgian poet, dramatist and philosopher, born 1862)

Let us start fairly with the great truth: for those who possess there is only one certain duty, which is to strip themselves of what they have so as to bring themselves into the condition of the mass that possesses nothing. It is understood, in every clear-thinking conscience, that no more imperative duty exists; but, at the same time, it is admitted that this duty, for lack of courage, is impossible of accomplishment.

For the rest, in the heroic history of duties, even at