"Life Without Principle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thoreau Henry David)

money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough
to hire a man who is minding his own business. An efficient and
valuable man does what he can, whether the community pay him for it or
not. The inefficient offer their inefficiency to the highest bidder,
and are forever expecting to be put into office. One would suppose
that they were rarely disappointed.

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I
feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still
very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a
livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent
serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to
me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am
successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased,
the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. 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. All
great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must
sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its
boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by
loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a
hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is
a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.

Merely to come into the world the heir of a fortune is not to be
born, but to be still-born, rather. To be supported by the charity
of friends, or a government pension- provided you continue to breathe-
by whatever fine synonyms you describe these relations, is to go
into the almshouse. On Sundays the poor debtor goes to church to
take an account of stock, and finds, of course, that his outgoes
have been greater than his income. In the Catholic Church, especially,
they go into chancery, make a clean confession, give up all, and think
to start again. Thus men will lie on their backs, talking about the
fall of man, and never make an effort to get up.

As for the comparative demand which men make on life, it is an
important difference between two, that the one is satisfied with a
level success, that his marks can all be hit by point-blank shots, but
the other, however low and unsuccessful his life may be, constantly
elevates his aim, though at a very slight angle to the horizon. I
should much rather be the last man- though, as the Orientals say,
"Greatness doth not approach him who is forever looking down; and
all those who are looking high are growing poor."

It is remarkable that there is little or nothing to be remembered
written on the subject of getting a living; how to make getting a