Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 3
Context: For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent; for three francs will feed you till tomorrow, and you cannot think further than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. You think vaguely, 'I shall be starving in a day or two--shocking, isn't it?' And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne. 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.
“We have a lot of anxieties, and one cancels out another very often.”
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Winston S. Churchill 601
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1874–1965Related quotes
On The Algebra of Logic (1885)
Interview with Stylelist.com, 10 February 2010 http://www.stylelist.com/2010/02/10/heidi-klum-heart-truth-red-dress/.
Source: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Frank Gehry, The City and Music (2002)
“Neurotics are anxiety prone, accident prone, and often just prone.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis
Quote from John Constable's letter to Rev. John Fisher (23 October 1821), from John Constable's Correspondence, part 6, pp. 76-78
1820s