Wealth & Money Quote by Oliver Herford

Herford turns devotion into a kind of comic martyrdom: the purest love, he suggests, isn’t the hobby you grind at for applause, but the one you keep doing even when you suspect you’ll never get good. It’s a brutal little inversion of the era’s self-improvement gospel. Late-Victorian and early modern culture loved the story of mastery - practice makes perfect, talent will rise, industriousness earns its reward. Herford yanks the ladder away. What remains is affection stripped of its most flattering alibis.

The line works because it smuggles a tender idea through a deadpan insult. “Without hope of fame and money” is the standard romantic defense of art: I’m doing this for love, not profit. Then comes the sharper clause: “without any hope of doing it well.” That’s where the joke bites. He’s not merely praising amateurism; he’s honoring a stubborn loyalty to the activity itself, independent of outcome. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the ego that hides inside “passion.” If you need the promise of excellence to keep going, maybe you love the image of yourself succeeding more than the thing.

There’s also a humane permission slip here. Herford, a humorist steeped in light verse and illustration, knew the cultural machinery that turns creativity into performance. By elevating the joyfully mediocre striver, he’s defending art as companionship rather than competition - a private ritual that doesn’t have to justify its existence with results.