" Fame cannot give pleasure to one who did not merit it but stole it; it produces a constant tremor only in one who is worthy of it. And therefore all his feelings and longings turned toward gold. Gold became his passion, his ideal, fear, delight, purpose. Bundles of banknotes grew in his coffers, and he, like everyone else to whom this terrible gift is granted, began to be a bore, inaccessible to anything but gold, a needless miser, a purposeless hoarder, and was about to turn into one of those strange beings who are so numerous in our unfeeling world, at whom a man filled with life and heart looks with horror, who seems to him like moving stone coffins with dead men instead of hearts in them. "

― Nikolai Gogol , The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol