Wealth & Money Quote by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

In one line, Celine turns poverty into theater and survival into a job interview. "If you aren't rich" sets the brutal premise: money isn't just comfort, it's exemption. The rich can afford to be idle, eccentric, even inconvenient. Everyone else has to perform a role that reassures the people with leverage. "Always look useful" is the sting. Not be useful, look useful. The verb choice exposes a world where perception outranks substance and where dignity is negotiated through optics.

The intent is not self-help; it's diagnostic, almost sneering. Celine is mapping the social physics of modern life: institutions, bosses, patrons, even acquaintances treat the poor as a potential drain unless they're legible as "value". Usefulness becomes camouflage. You don't display your inner life; you display employability. It's cynicism sharpened into advice.

The subtext is transactional and coercive. When survival depends on appearing necessary, you internalize the gaze of authority. You anticipate judgment, tailor your posture, edit your needs. Celine compresses class anxiety into a single imperative, implying that the poor are granted conditional visibility: you're allowed to exist, provided you can justify the space you take up.

Context matters. Writing out of early 20th-century France, amid mass bureaucracy, precarious labor, and the churn of war-era economies, Celine understood how quickly people become interchangeable. His work often treats society as a machine that grinds down the vulnerable; this line is the user manual. It's bleakly funny because it's true enough to feel like a secret you weren't supposed to say aloud.