Down and Out in Paris and London

by George Orwell

In short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering.

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money.

The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.