Happiness Quote by Sarah Bernhardt

Poverty gets waved off here not as naivete but as provocation: a stage diva daring the world to admit how badly it wants what only the stage can give. Bernhardt is selling a faith, not a budget. In three quick questions, she flips the usual hierarchy - money as necessity, art as luxury - and insists on the reverse. For the true devotee, art is not decoration; it is a portable country, an inner treasury that can outshine the empty purse.

The subtext is personal and strategic. Bernhardt came up in a cultural economy that romanticized the starving artist while simultaneously exploiting performers. By asking "What matters anything", she reframes deprivation as almost irrelevant beside the intoxication of creation and spectatorship. It is an assertion of dignity: if society won’t pay you properly, you can still claim a kind of sovereign wealth in feeling, sensation, beauty. It is also a seductive bit of rhetoric aimed at patrons and audiences: love us, and you’ll be rich where it counts.

Notice the possessive "our art". This isn’t abstract Aestheticism; it’s guild talk, a theatrical "we" defending its value. "Enamoured" does double duty: it means the fan’s devotion, but also the artist’s own love affair with performance - the kind that makes hunger feel like background noise. The line works because it’s both balm and dare, a glamorous lie that contains a bruising truth about what artists are asked to endure.