Marry for love, work for your living; marry for money, work for your liberty.
But enough of these. It will ever hold true that competitive business breeds deception and selfish greed. The
business man who pretends otherwise is either a hypocrite or of dull moral sense.
In this race for riches, whether along the peaceful avenue of economy or jostling in the streets of speculation, where comes in the Pursuit of Happiness? Riches, as I have shown, are and can be nothing more than means to this end, and those who, through avarice, greed, or rapacity, make them the end and aim of their aspirations, trade gold for dross. Scarcely less is the error of those who are ever postponing the hour of enjoyment until a certain sum is reached, and their fortune can be rounded off with additional thousands. It is a general tendency in human nature to live in the past or the future, although the present alone is man’s. What to him is now, and here, is all that he can ever possess or enjoy; and if you ask him, he will grant it; but he is driven ever by what seems an irrational and demonic power to seek his joy in what is somewhere else, far off, out of reach, impossible of attainment, beyond his capacities.
The illusive pictures drawn by memory, by hope, and by imagination have their proper place in the palace of Human Happiness; but the majority fix their gaze steadily on these alone, and wander through halls and chambers filled with rich stuffs and costly ware, through corridors looking out on entrancing views and courts opening to the starry heavens, their eyes fixed vacantly on the far distance, and noting nothing of the beauties by which they are surrounded. To waken them by some whisper of what they
are missing, and to persuade them to turn their eyes on what is around them, will be my purpose in the chapters immediately to follow.
Bishop Berkeley declared that he was the richest man in England, because he had trained himself to the habit of mind of regarding everything which gave him pleasure as his own. In our days, most philosophers of that school reside in penitentiaries.
The disappointments of the nouveau riche are, that what he would like to buy is not on sale, and what he expected to get for nothing, he finds can only be had by paying for it.