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

living not merely holiest and honorable, but altogether inviting and
glorious; for if getting a living is not so, then living is not. One
would think, from looking at literature, that this question had
never disturbed a solitary individual's musings. Is it that men are
too much disgusted with their experience to speak of it? The lesson of
value which money teaches, which the Author of the Universe has
taken so much pains to teach us, we are inclined to skip altogether.
As for the means of living, it is wonderful how indifferent men of all
classes are about it, even reformers, so called- whether they inherit,
or earn, or steal it. I think that Society has done nothing for us
in this respect, or at least has undone what she has done. Cold and
hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men
have adopted and advise to ward them off.

The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one
be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other
men?- if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle? Does
Wisdom work in a tread-mill? or does she teach how to succeed by her
example? Is there any such thing as wisdom not applied to life? Is she
merely the miller who grinds the finest logic? It is pertinent to
ask if Plato got his living in a better way or more successfully
than his contemporaries- or did he succumb to the difficulties of life
like other men? Did he seem to prevail over some of them merely by
indifference, or by assuming grand airs? or find it easier to live,
because his aunt remembered him in her will? The ways in which most
men get their living, that is, live, are mere makeshifts, and a
shirking of the real business of life- chiefly because they do not
know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.

The rush to California, for instance, and the attitude, not merely
of merchants, but of philosophers and prophets, so called, in relation
to it, reflect the greatest disgrace on mankind. That so many are
ready to live by luck, and so get the means of commanding the labor of
others less lucky, without contributing any value to society! And that
is called enterprise! I know of no more startling development of the
immorality of trade, and all the common modes of getting a living. The
philosophy and poetry and religion of such a mankind are not worth the
dust of a puffball. The hog that gets his living by 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. Even Mahomet knew that God did
not make this world in jest. It makes God to be a moneyed gentleman
who scatters a handful of pennies in order to see mankind scramble for
them. The world's raffle! A subsistence in the domains of Nature a
thing to be raffled for! What a comment, what a satire, on our
institutions! The conclusion will be, that mankind will hang itself
upon a tree. And have all the precepts in all the Bibles taught men
only this? and is the last and most admirable invention of the human
race only an improved muck-rake? Is this the ground on which Orientals
and Occidentals meet? Did God direct us so to get our living,