Wealth & Money Quote by Henry Miller

Miller isn’t offering self-help so much as smuggling an aesthetic manifesto into a pep talk. The imperative mood - "Develop interest", "Forget yourself" - has the bark of someone who’s watched introspection curdle into vanity, paralysis, or respectable misery. Coming from a writer infamous for turning his own appetites and humiliations into literature, the line lands with a productive irony: the great chronicler of Henry Miller is telling you to stop being the subject.

The intent is less moral than practical. "Interest" is a discipline, not a personality trait. Miller frames attention as a craft you can train: look harder, listen longer, read wider. The list is telling: people and things sit beside literature and music, collapsing the hierarchy between high art and street-level observation. That’s his whole project in miniature - the world as material, not mirror.

Subtext: self-obsession is a dead end masquerading as depth. "Forget yourself" doesn’t mean erase your desires; it means quit treating your interior life as the only credible drama. In Miller’s era - between modernism’s inward turn and the mid-century cult of therapy and authenticity - the self became both sacred and exhausting. His counterproposal is almost radical in its simplicity: attention as salvation, curiosity as an antidote to despair.

Context matters. Miller wrote out of exile, poverty, and scandal, chasing intensity over propriety. So "the world is so rich" reads like defiance: a refusal to let institutions, shame, or circumstance shrink reality. The sentence throbs because it’s trying to rewire your gaze from self-surveillance to appetite for existence.