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All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does.
Money is beautiful, because it is a liberation… Wanting to go and die in Peking and not being able to is something that weighs on me like the idea of some imminent cataclysm. The buyers of useless things are always wiser than they think: they are buying small dreams. They are children when it comes to buying. They are drawn to small, useless objects, which beckon to them when they realise there is money to be spent, and the buyers take possession of them as gleefully as a child picking up shells from the beach! For a child, no two shells are ever alike. He falls asleep with the two prettiest ones clasped in his hand, and when they are lost or thrown away — a near-crime, as if bits of his soul had been stolen or fragments torn from his dreams! — he weeps like a God who has been robbed of his newly created universe.
