Life without principle
three essays
by Henry David Thoreau · first published 1902
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This essay is one the Thoreau's strongest judgements of America's constituted society. This goes along with the public address of "Slavery in Massachusetts" and his defense of John Brown. Please Note: This book is easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. This eBook is printable.
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Loosely related Thoreau quotation (and one of my all-time favorites), from Life Without Principle: > Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.
on “Thoreau on Defining Your Own Success” ↗…messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. A much shorter read in the same vein–and without all the digressions about the economics of farming beans–is "Life Without Principle". I recommend reading that first over Walden as something of a primer. By the time of Life Without Principle Thoreau was giving public lectures and had gotten better at shorter arguments (though he likely…
on “Thoreau Was Actually Funny” ↗…The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day. (Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle[1], 1854) [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Life_Without_Principle
on “All you need is e-mail, e-mail. E-mail is all you need.” ↗I am reminded of H.D. Thoreau's essay "Life Without Principle"[1] where he has plenty to say about the ill effects, to the mind and soul, of filling one's head with ordinary news and other trivia. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit…
on “News is bad for you (2013)” ↗I'd go so far as to say that book not worth re-reading isn't worth reading once. That could work well as an argument against reading newspapers. Thoreau in Life Without Principle: "We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times.…
on “Are Audiobooks as Good for You as Reading?” ↗…rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for it. -- Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle"
on “You might not need Kubernetes” ↗…rooting, stirring up the soil so, would be ashamed of such company. If I could command the wealth of all the worlds by lifting my finger, I would not pay such a price for it. -- Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle" http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER2/thoreau/life.html
on “Blizzard Postpones World of Warcraft 15th Anniversary Event in Taiwan” ↗…unless they are in a sense effaced each morning, or rather rendered fertile by the dews of fresh and living truth. Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven. – Thoreau, Life Without Principle
on “Ask HN: Does anyone find it strange that sport is part of daily news?” ↗…have their wood measured correctly- that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge. - Henry David Thoreau, from Life Without Principle, 1863 https://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper2/thoreau/life.html
on “The billable hour is a trap into which more and more of us are falling” ↗…heaven.” [1] Heaven is not divorced from the earth; enlightenment is not separate from ordinary mind [2] [0] https://palisuttas.com/tag/sutra-of-innumerable-meanings/ [1] Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle [2] https://irarabois.com/read-the-eternities-who-knew-there-was...
on “I'll Never Get Y'all to Read the Bible, Will I?” ↗