The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit - how it grows! what a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment, how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies - oh, yes, and how soon and how easily our dream-life and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together that we can't quite tell which is which, anymore.
Of course, most luxury goods in China are for corrupted officials and their relatives. And that made China become the biggest luxury-goods market. In this kind of dictatorship, in this kind of totalitarian society, it is easy to make deals that you cannot make in a democratic society.
The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.
Alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know
Both poverty and wealth, therefore, have a bad effect on the quality of the work and the workman himself. Wealth and poverty, I answered. One produces luxury and idleness and a passion for novelty, the other meanness and bad workmanship and revolution into the bargain.
No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.
Having a kid made me realize, "I have to take care of this kid, but I can't have the luxury of dropping everything in the world and spending every waking moment with him. I've got to work."
If I could sell 500 million records every time, it would be great. But I've also had the luxury experience of having it when I was a teenager, in a very kind of model version of it.