The author is cheating the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money [is], at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly [whenever] he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay.

Hello, Buzzfeed… 

19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer presages the economics of the web and modern publishing – linkbait, content farming, unnecessary pagination, endless slideshows, and other moral failures of publishing, examined in a whole new-old light.

(via explore-blog)