Life is always more interesting when one takes risks and lives in the knowledge that to act is to risk. But sometimes it happens that there is so much bad luck that the successive setbacks accumulate in an unbearably disappointing way, and soon one loses that minimum of hope without which one cannot take a risk. Such discouragement is the death of the spirit, and it is undoubtedly much more profitable to spend one’s life as a deluded madman than to succumb to it; for the madman at least acts, and from his action something good can be drawn.