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Book: Life Without Principle
Quotes of Book: Life Without Principle
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  1. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.
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  2. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
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  3. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.
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  4. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will most readily pay for it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe.
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  5. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living."
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  6. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, to life itself, than this incessant business.
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  7. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.
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  8. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    In my opinion, the sun was made to light worthier toil than this.
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  9. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.
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  10. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    Be not simply good; be good for something.
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  11. Henry David Thoreau _ Life Without Principle

    This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank-book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents. An Irishman, seeing me making a minute in the fields, took it for granted that I was calculating my wages. If a man was tossed out of a window when an infant, and so made a cripple for life, or scared out of his wits by the Indians, it is regretted chiefly because he was thus incapacitated for-business! I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself, than this incessant business.
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